Gone: Poems"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 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
agony angel ANGRIA apartment block ashes baby belief bird blanket bleeds blood brain burn cement chest CHILDREN TURNED chill coat cold color d__d dark day I prayed Depression despair died dirty doubt dream face faithless Fanny farther fear feathers feel folded forgery forget gone hand hanging Hannah Arendt talks hate heart holes imprint inside jail kill knees laugh legs LET IT SNOW lifted light lips lived lost love to die lyric memory MICHIGAN mind mother mouth murder nailed never night pain person plank poet Poetry pollen prose poem pulled rain raincoat river shed Simone Weil sisters skin sleep someone somewhere soul spirit squared station Stick string superhuman effort telephone thin tongue tulip unbuttoned UNDAY UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Virginia Woolf vocabulary wall Weil's wind wings WINTER DISTANCES wires words worm yellow