Do We Need Another Dickinson?

I recently picked up a copy of The Pocket Emily Dickinson, edited by Brenda Hillman. This is a third edition. It was first published by Shambala Press as part of their “Shambhala Pocket Classics” series. There are a number of scholarly editions of selections and complete poetry of Emily Dickinson out there. There is a lot to roil through in other tomes as to what edition represents the real text: textual notes, emendations, and redactions already fill volumes and chapters of other editions. I have been sitting with this one since March (2026), and I think this collection is special for a number of reasons but mainly the selection of poems and the selector.

Brenda Hillman, the editor of this collection, is also a poet with eleven poetry collections under her belt published by Wesleyan University Press, including In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022). She was also an English professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her author bio at Shambala reads: “BRENDA HILLMAN is the author of over ten poetry collections, including Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, Practical Water, and Pieces of Air in the Epic. Born in Arizona, Hillman is a graduate of both Pomona College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and more. Her 1993 collection Bright Existence was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.” So this is a lot of professional cred here but the thing that is important to me is that she is a practicing poet herself with an ear finely tuned to language, human experience, and the inner voice.

This edition does not ask you to study Dickinson, but to experience her work in a hundred of Dickinson’s best poems selected by Hillman. This curation of poetry sought out the “unique and gemlike lyrics…pure distillations of profound feeling and great intellect” and as the Shambala description claims, “they contain a world of imagination, observation, and precisely articulated spiritual and emotional experience.” These are the poems that you can come back to again and again. If you have studied Dickinson before, there are poems here that are old friends, and then seen in a different light in how they sit next to other poems. I would also recommend this as the edition you should get someone who is not a poet, English teacher, or scholar: this is Emily Dickinson freed from the burden of scholarship!

For myself, I picked this up in San Francisco on my birthday. I turned 65 and retired. I wanted some poetry to read that weekend and for some reason, I was irresistibly drawn to this book. So the answer is yes, we do need another Dickinson. I could not have chosen a better companion for the year.