“A new literary biography of one of America’s most-loved and most mysterious poets. Charyn reveals a woman quite different from the lonely spinster we are all used to: a sexual woman engaged with herself and the world in a deeply philosophical way.”

“In A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn penetrates to the heart of Emily Dickinson, commonly thought to be a gifted but withdrawn spinster. He explores the ‘demon’ in her, the ‘predator,’ and should make readers go back to her poetry with a new understanding of why she still works her spell in our time.”

“Jerome Charyn’s A Loaded Gun is a staggeringly brilliant meditation on Emily Dickinson’s life and work, one that will shatter forever the myth of ‘the virgin recluse.’ His shrewd and provocative reading of her life, her loves, and her times allows us to understand in new ways just how Dickinson reinvented the language of poetry itself. One of the great and most original storytellers of our time, Charyn takes us deep inside the mysterious power and glory of Dickinson’s poetry, and into the strange, bold fearlessness of her outlaw life.”

“Provocative, sexy, pulsing with energy, and sometimes outrageous, Jerome Charyn’s A Loaded Gun revisits the subject he ‘couldn’t let go’ after completing his novel, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. Tunneling into the poems, letters, biographies, and works of art inspired by Dickinson, Charyn presents the poet as ‘a Satanic, catlike sibyl,’ adept with masks, tricks, and outlaw escapes from convention. Keeping the subjects of the poet’s family, religion, sexuality, and poetic ‘tradecraft’ whirling in the air, he shows us Emily Dickinson as a ‘target who never sits still.’”

“Remarkable insight . . . [a] unique meditation/investigation. . . . Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these.”

“An intense work of literary scholarship. . . . [H]ighly recommended.”

“A celebrated master of literary voice, Charyn inhabits Dickinson from the first page. . . . [A Loaded Gun] is a gratifying nut of poetic analysis, historical psychology, and the passionate homage of a lifelong disciple of the beloved Belle of Amherst.”

“Charyn explores how the gaps in knowledge about Dickinson’s biography and writings contribute to her ever-expanding mystique. . . . [His] inviting prose allows readers with any degree of expertise on the life and work of Dickinson an entryway into her innovative, marvelous poetry.”

“A writer obsessed with the Belle of Amherst imagines her rich, sensual inner life. . . . Charyn’s ardent sleuthing yields a daring portrait of the elusive ‘enchantress’ and her world.”

“A postmodernism-flavored study of Emily Dickinson’s life and work. . . . [A] lively reassessment [with] vivid commentary.”

“In his reexamination of Dickinson as a sensitive recluse, Charyn does the influential poetess justice by admitting her ambition. Dickinson’s irreverence for grammatical and societal convention made her a revolutionary figure. Charyn gives the writer due credit for engineering her reputation and role, and not being a victim to it.”

“Charyn has followed Dickinson as assiduously as Alice down the rabbit hole. . . . Is Dickinson gay? Read Charyn’s fascinating thesis and decide.”

“Charyn is intrigued by the hermeneutics of biography and literary criticism. He is steeped in the work of Dickinson scholars and readers. . . . For Charyn the poems are Emily Dickinson, the vital part of herself that as a woman in nineteenth-century Massachusetts she could only fully express by keeping to herself—not as someone shy of society so much as one who knew society simply could not reciprocate what she had to offer. In other words, Charyn’s Dickinson is not agoraphobic, not a neurotic, but a writer in charge of her destiny.”

“Reading Jerome Charyn sometimes evokes the sensation of seeing Dickinson arise from her poems. . . . [H]e is about the work of enlarging the universe of her person and her poetry while he shows how much more there is still to do in fathoming her depths and contours.”

“A Loaded Gun is a fascinating meditation on an individual’s relationship to language and her place in the world, and Charyn’s quest will appeal not only to poetry lovers and Dickinson fans, but to anyone who understands the joy of immersing oneself in a puzzle to which no definitive ‘answer’ yet exists.”

“An imaginative and unprecedented look at Emily Dickinson that is part biography, part literary criticism, and altogether fascinating.”

“Less literary criticism than threnody, a bold, loose-limbed, Whitman-like prose-poem lamenting the constrictive previous, but still prevailing, notions of Dickinson and lauding instead a wild woman of words. . . . A Loaded Gun is an invitation to meet Dickinson on the dizzyingly high ground of her imagination from a fellow writer who has done just that with his own writing.”

“Charyn is a man, a New Yorker, living in the twenty-first century, yet he understands this female rebel from New England like no one else can.”

“One of the most distinctively different critical works on Emily Dickinson. . . . Startling, inventive, and vibrant with expressive energy.”

“Ecstatic. . . . [Charyn] may be the perversely perfect critic for the poet who wandered ‘The House of Supposition — / The Glimmering Frontier that / Skirts the Acres of Perhaps—.’”

“[Emily Dickinson] will blow the top of your head off, no matter what century you live in. Charyn looks at a lot of ways to see this revolutionary, subversive, explosive genius.”

“In A Loaded Gun, [Charyn] is again out to release Dickinson from the myths that have enclosed her. . . . With essayistic chapters on Dickinson’s mother, her dog, her servants, her photographic image, her poetic fragments—Charyn’s book is perhaps best viewed as yet another imaginative attempt to get to the source of Dickinson’s emotional intensity, and to imagine an ‘Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century.’”

“A magnetic nonfiction reevaluation of the mystifying, radical, perhaps bisexual, and maybe greatest-ever American poet.”