Reading “leaves no trace; its product is invisible,” or so Susan Stewart argues in On Longing, theorizing reading as an immaterial activity of the mind, implicitly divorced from the body.1 Sometime in 1865, as the Civil War was drawing to a close, Emily Dickinson came to a different conclusion in a short poem contesting such an ethereal conception of reading. The poem rehearses, rather cryptically, a scenario that had become tragically familiar in many households on both sides of the conflict, the reading of a letter announcing a soldier’s death and the devastating grief that the news of this loss caused in the surviving relatives.