Celebrated poet Fanny Howe's final book, a kaleidoscopic recasting of her twenty-first-century poems
For decades, Fanny Howe has been our great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she has gathered a selection of poems and excerpts from the last thirty years, including new and revised poems, and has arranged them into an astonishing singular poem. Across this brilliant reconfiguration of her work, we follow the poet as seeker, both faithful and foolish, searching for language and existence beyond the machines of economy, judgment, and war. Howe interrogates the contradiction and violence of the twenty-first century, the misbegotten experiences that have given rise to a culture of authority and adulthood rather than one of innocence and childhood.
These spare lyrical shards move with a jagged but persistent direction-leading us between doubt and belief and toward Howe's enduring vision for a life of humility, justice, and imagination. Celebrated poet Fanny Howe's final book, a kaleidoscopic recasting of her twenty-first-century poems Fanny Howe (1940–2025) was the author of many books, including Love and I, The Needle's Eye, and Second Childhood, a finalist for the National Book Award. She received the Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. "Fanny Howe is uncommonly difficult to categorize or place. She could be called a lyric poet, a serial poet, a religious poet, a nature poet, and a love poet. In her work as in life, Howe is restless, always in motion, and full of contradictions. It's fitting then that This Poor Book is not just another 'selected poems.' It is instead a new book-length poem shaped from pieces taken from her books of the last twenty-five years as well as including new poems. No titles separate the pieces of this patchwork. It seems that Howe has invented a new genre. We follow the figure of the writer as itinerant wanderer, sometimes an errant monk, sometimes a refugee, owning nothing, internally-and literally-displaced. This wanderer is someone judgment has ruled against, someone distrustful of human institutions with their hierarchies and rigidities, someone wanting a solitary cottage, a monk's cell, the love of a human, the love of God. One thing that sets Howe apart from many writers is that she is a poet of hope as well as uncertainty, faith, and doubt. This means she risks looking foolish and also that she possesses courage. The result is a book with the impetus of narrative and the beauty of lyric poetry at its best. This Poor Book is revelatory and casts Howe's poetry in a new light, and for those who don't know her work already, this is a perfect introduction. Fanny Howe is an essential poet, in what has become our time of the displaced-on the road, seeking asylum, passing through (but not beyond) a world that is both hurtful and beautiful."-Rae Armantrout, author of Versed
