The Right Hand

Rosa Lane brings a necessary, gender-fluid, feminist perspective to the Emily Dickinson table of debate. In bold tribute with a title utilizing the last two words Emily Dickinson wrote, Rosa Lane's Called Back converses with one of our greatest poets in theatrical monologue-decoding secrets amid the blatant. Evoked by epigraphs selected from Dickinson's work, Lane's poems, through her I-speaker, reveal the extraordinary to be found in the ordinary and speak to the struggle of sexual orientation, otherness, and the challenges of living in a Calvinistic socioreligious world of oughts and noughts as evidenced in Dickinson's poems. From sapphic eroticism and subsequent pangs of nonbelonging to tacking next life as a welcome reprieve, poems in Called Back create a de novo dot-connecting lyrical narrative.