[1] When Dickinson was eighteen months old, she contracted meningitis and was hospitalized for two weeks during the acute phase; she lost her hearing after age six.
[3] In her volume of poetry entitled Silence Fell, which became a New York Times editor's choice book in 2007,[4] she wrote about her six-year marriage to her husband, which began when she was 41 and he was in his late 80s.
[2] Reviewer James Longenbach in the New York Times described her poetry as not showy, with delicate near-rhymes which feel "inevitable" and that her subject matter showed an "acute relationship to the physical sensation of language" which "distinguishes these humble, deftly made poems.
[5] Critic Phoebe Pettingell calls Dickinson's early work "underwritten," but praised Silence Fell as, "emotionally engaging," expressing the hope that Dickinson would "develop from a pleasant, provincial poet to a rich and strange singer of the rural scene."
Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, poet Amy Newman described Dickinson as having "a talent for conveying the inaudible, the aura around us that can't be heard but can be felt."