An exceptionally interesting and attractive coffee table sized book featuring the 52 ‘envelope poems’ found in Dickinson’s desk and papers after her death at age 55 in 1885.  Using envelopes addressed to herself, her father, sister, and others in the household and friends, Dickinson wrote brief snippets of poetry on the unsealed and flattened out empty envelope’s inner surface, the torn off flap, and other scraps.  The book presents these poems in photographs of the envelope fragments, showing both the front and the back and accompanying the sometimes illegible scrawl with ‘translation’.   The cross outs, corrections, alternative words stacked one above the other, and various orientations of the lines are all clearly evident.  The addressee, the 3cent US Postage stamp, and the relatively unchanged from today postmark are all quite clear.  By the time of the first of these envelope poems, i.e. around 1862, Dickinson was writing 300 poems/year resulting in 1800 distinct poems, 2357 drafts, and 1150 letters and prose fragments.  The editors liken these envelope poems to the technique used to measure the reliability of homing pigeons where birds were tossed into the air at random angles and observed to see what angle they flew off on—so, too, these poems are released into the air and observed for their direction, effect, and messages.  Lovely volume.