The author writes in her introductory notes, "These poems are erased from Emily Dickinson's poems of 1861 an 1862, the first years of the United States Civil War." The back cover contains the following quote by Tom Raworth: "In the tradition of Tom Phillips' " A Humument" and Ronald Johnson's "Radios", Janet Holmes mines or excises Emily Dickinson's Civil War period poems to engender a vision of the current wars in the Middle East."Amazon.com: "If you write out 'The Poems of Emily Dickinson' and erase some of the letters very neatly and precisely, you can get to THE MS OF M Y KIN--the manuscript of my kin, as it were; the manuscript of my family. It might also be said to be the manuscript of my kind." "If Ronald Johnson had an epic (Paradise Lost) to erase in creating his masterwork, RADI OS, then Janet Holmes has chosen a more difficult task, namely that of erasing from the most compressed poetry there is. Emily Dickinson's poems come to us so nearly pre-erased that their further erasure by Holmes dramatically frees instances of prophecy, voices from 1861-62 rediscovered in contemporary political discourse. It seems that the best of the embeds in Iraq was Emily Dickinson; read her reports from the (af)front here." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.