When Josephine Foster released A Wolf in SheepÂ’s Clothing in 2006, she provocatively set the lieder of composers like Schumman, Brahms, and Schubert in a unique setting. She sang them in German and played acoustic guitar, piano, and harmonica with improvising electric guitarist Brian Goodman accompanying her for a cotemporary feel. Though her music exists in a unique space, she echos risk-taking classic folk performers such as Shirley Collins. On Graphic as a Star — her debut album for Fire Records — she has written music to the poems of Emily Dickinson, and the fit is seamless. She conceived the 26-song cycle while living in a remote region of Spain and had brought very few books with her. DickinsonÂ’s poems provided comfort. In her liner notes she claims these songs came together in a matter of weeks. Musically, this is more sparse than anything sheÂ’s ever recorded — accompanying herself only on an acoustic guitar, sometimes with a primitive-sounding harmonica added. She also she sings a cappella (“Wild Nights – Wild Nights!”) or with only the sounds of chirping birds in the background (“What Shall I Do – It Whimpers So -”). While all of FosterÂ’s work is provocative, this proves the warmest, loveliest, and most beautifully articulated recording in her catalog. These poems (which were also written in solitude; Dickinson was a self-imposed shut-in) easily lend themselves to FosterÂ’s song forms, due to the poetÂ’s keen sense of time, rhythm, and space. Dickinson’s writing is often wonderfully elliptical in image and meaning; Foster underscores this here: there are no choruses. These songs are small but evoke the vast emptiness surrounding them. They donÂ’t feel melancholy, even when they are, such as in “My Life Had Stood – A Loaded Gun -.“ Instead they are evocative of an America at once imagined and longed for — and this sense of homesickness is evident in the reedy beauty of FosterÂ’s voice — which is more controlled and tempered here than ever before; she seems to have found the exact pitch and timbre sheÂ’s sought since the beginning. While the entire cycle is gorgeous and the tunes nearly inseparable from one another, a couple of tracks lend themselves to singling out: the lilting early American folk melody in “Tho’ My Destiny Be Fustian -“ and the languid, bluesy stroll of “I Could bring You Jewels – Had I a Mind To -.” Graphic as a Star is exquisite. – Thom Jurek