New and Selected Poems
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
One of NPR’s “Books We Love in 2024” and a California Review of Books Best Poetry of the Year
Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature
“[This book] makes a concise case for Howe's status as an essential poet.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
An indispensable collection of more than four decades of profound, luminous poetry from acclaimed poet Marie Howe.
Characterized by “a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions” (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of Howe’s four previous collections—including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award–longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood—and contains twenty new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about aging while walking the dog, Howe is “a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy” (Dorianne Laux).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Howe's bountiful fifth collection (after Magdalene) offers a crown of new poems to open selections from her quietly astonishing body of work. These new pieces showcase the poet's characteristic gifts: unearthing the sacred in the everyday and conferring upon the ordinary its rightful aureole: "how small it is sometimes, this Now." Powerful, career-long continuities surface ("it's good to have a dog with you when you are practicing/ not being there: You don't feel so all alone"). In addition to the singular, lyrical voice that distinguishes her earlier work ("the I that caused me so much trouble"), the poet opens into a planetary, even anthropogenic dimension: "We took of the earth and took and took, and the earth/ seemed not to mind." The poems original to the collection subtly chart the writer's coming into her full power: "Now you know what it is to be afraid," she declares in the face of extinction, as prophet, witness, confessor, and guide: "You were once a citizen of the country called I Don't Know./ Remember the boat that brought you here. It was your body: Climb in." The unmistakable objects of Howe's attention remain steadfastly present ("thing and spirit both: the real/ world: evident, invisible"), suffused by a tender doom. This is a necessary compilation for times of crisis.
