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Synopsis
"With extraordinary self-scrutiny and complexity—unmatchable musical poise and beauty—Fanny Howe examines our relationship with 'other' worlds, purgatories of various kinds: genetic, historical, theological. She writes from a world where hell is as close as God, or family, or love, where nothing happens that can, her syntax doubling back, as though it were possible by such formal and linguistic means to transform doubt into faith. It is a wonder to watch this poet try to decipher error with the knowledge that each error is necessary and the only guide is disguised as love. Heart, come along and be as heartless/ as you know you are, she tells us. Work this honest is rare indeed."—Jorie Graham
"Howe's new volume is a double-edged sword: in it she creates beauty and questions it, pursues faith and lives with doubt, finds love and finds hate there waiting. Her book 'transverberates' with all the paradoxes at 'the crux/of the huddle.' Howe is always an unpretentious pilgrim 'shinnying up the silence' into ever thinner atmospheres. I trust her as much as I have ever trusted anyone."—Rae Armantrout, author of Veil: New and Selected Poems
"Fanny Howe's poems travel through stations, agonies, and intoxications to build a phenomenology of spirits. Her language lays bare the human condition of vision and unknowing, inheritance and reinvention. These impish devotions move holy and astray."—Elizabeth Willis, author of The Human Abstract
Publishers Weekly
Mixing serial poems with shorter work and spots of prose, poet and novelist Howe (Indivisible; One Crossed Out) combines skeptical clarity and a mindful, at times humor-tinged desire to locate the intersection of spiritual and physical presence in daily life: "A decent soul comes in red-rum colors/ It is a floating shadow/ Not water or air but something nearly solid/ A hint of cinnamon and bark/ And some people know how to circle their lips/ around a mouth and suck the soul away." Howe's speaker treats faith and doubt as aspects of unitary consciousness, often using imbalances of power as a frame for her explorations, as in "The history of the defeated": "Eternal life/ as if to prove/ the principal/ root of the verb/ to falsify/ is life/ itself an excess/ since whoever is/ identified/ is already buried/ while staying still/ will show what nothing is." A short essay-like prose piece on Simone Weil's writings confronts conversion on linguistic ground, as Howe, who in another poem writes "I hate therefore/ the word `prayer'/ since every word is one," questions the bait-and-switch of language as attached to the possibility of salvation: "You have to make yourself believe. Is this possible? Can you turn `void' into `God' by switching the words over and over again?" Howe's willingness to take on subject matter that many poets shy away from is handled with care, complexity and passionate clarity. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.