The 19th Century American poet, Emily Dickinson, is known for her powerful and innovative poetry. Dickinson filled her poems with dashes of all kinds--long, short, straight, slanted and quivering--across scraps of paper of different shapes and sizes that she found around her house.

Dickinson is also known as somewhat of a recluse: she voluntarily confined herself to her home for most of her life, which makes her poems all the more relevant to our socially-distanced lives today.

Her poems echo with creaks and footsteps, the resounding voices of frogs and birds, and the eerie buzz of insects--subtleties that build a sort of tension we might identify with more than ever in our confinement during this global health crisis. In this Olio, Christina Katopodis will facilitate a discussion about a small selection of Emily Dickinson's poems, particularly those related to being confined in small spaces. We will closely read her poems and engage in a creative writing exercise.