PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist O, The Oprah Magazine 'Best Books of Summer' selection 'Magnetic nonfiction.' --O, The Oprah Magazine 'Remarkable insight ...[a] unique meditation/investigation...Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these.' --Joyce Carol Oates, author of Wild Nights! and The Lost Landscape We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote: My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun-- ...Though I than He-- may longer live He longer must--than I-- For I have but the power to kill, Without--the power to die-- Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show