Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), although an extremely prolific poet and arguably America's greatest, published fewer than a dozen of her 1,800 poems. She created small handmade books at home. In her later years, when she stopped producing these, she continued writing extensively and, upon her death, left behind many verses, drafts, and letters. Among the scattered and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson's later works are the poems in envelopes gathered here. These envelope manuscripts (recycled by the poet with signs of New England's frugality) were written with all the force of her last, most radical period. The poems in envelopes are full of life and charged with a special melancholy—addressing no one and everyone at the same time. The colored reproductions are accompanied by the pioneering transcriptions of Dickinson's handwriting by Martha L. Werner and Jen Bervin. Their transcriptions allow us to read the texts, while the reproductions let us see exactly what Dickinson wrote (the alternative words, strikethroughs, dashes, directionality fields, spaces, columns, and overlapping layers).