Perfect for the poetry fan who is short on time, The Emily Dickinson Reader offers Paul Legault’s ingenious and madcap one-line renderings of each of Dickinson’s 1,789 poems. Take that familiar chestnut, #314, a la Legault: “Hope is kind of like birds. In that I don’t have any.” Or the classic hymn, #615: “God likes to watch.”

As Dickinson herself said in #769 (basically, via our translator): “This dead person used to be a person!”—and The Emily Dickinson Reader is here to tell you what that person meant.