Review
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“A fresh occasion not just to celebrate Howe, who
turned seventy-eight this year, but also to read her anew, which
is the more formidable and ultimately more rewarding charge.
Wildly and wantonly she is bringing everything to the table,
including poetry, history, research, politics, autobiography,
imagination, obsession and love, all the while demonstrating how
strange, puzzling, and untamed writing and thinking can be.”
- Maggie Nelson, Artforum
“Definition of poetry as the intersection of , sound, and
sense.”
- Christopher Higgs, Big Other
“Coming after the publication of over thirty books and chapbooks,
it is difficult not to read Debths, Susan Howe’s first
full-length collection of poetry since Spontaneous Particulars in
2014, as the culminating gesture of her remarkable career.
Indeed, Howe, who turns eighty this year, has suggested it is
likely her last book. If this is so, I can think of no better way
to crown her many decades wandering through the American literary
wilderness: Debths reads like the crescendo at the conclusion of
a symphony. It is a profound synthesis of Howe’s obsessions,
methods, and concerns as a writer―a recursive loop back through
her oeuvre, but also a renewal of its main lines, drawing the
various threads together into a tighter weave. Howe's writing is
as vital now as it has ever been.”
- Stephen Collis, Boston Review
“Debths is a fascinating look at art across time. Howe adroitly
brings into conversation both identified and unknown source
material to create a finely woven exploration of narrative and
transmission anchored in the American past and future....composed
of elements from her own childhood, the art of Paul Thek, draft
annotations of late Yeats, fairy tales, dictionary entries, and
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum...the resulting counterpoint
is quite complex, but it is ultimately one of strange consonance
that rings true in the same way as a story too strange to have
been invented.”
- Sarah Huener, Chicago Review of Books
“Monomania has its rewards―an incantatory power that shines
through. Howe’s images, being historical as well as biographical,
have the eerie shading of ghosts half-believed in, giving a
surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his
sharpest.”
- Kirkus Reviews
“Howe’s telepathic poetry is also the most attentive to
materiality: handwriting, spacing, the slightest fold or crevice
which might contain fragments, marginalia, a scribble of poesy.
And that’s just it―Howe’s attention is the essential rigor of all
poetry.”
- Literary Hub
“For nearly thirty years, Howe has occupied a particular and
invaluable place in American poetry. She’s a rigorously
skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose
demystifying intelligence is matched by a passionate embrace of
poetry’s rejuvenating power.”
- John Palattella, The Boston Review
“Howe should be read in the company of Pound, Stevens, Stein,
Ashbery and other American poets who reconfigured the ground
rules of their art. With her long career in view today, her
comment on Dickinson, in 1985, applies to Howe herself: ‘A great
poet, carrying the antique imagination of her hers, requires
of each reader to leap from a place of certain signification, to
a new situation, undiscovered, and sovereign. She carries
intelligence of the past into future of our thought by reverence
and revolt.”
- Langdon Hammer, The New York Review of Books
“Howe is among the worthiest heirs to the high-modernist line in
American poetry, interested in the accidents, smudges, and tears
that fasten works of literature to their material embodiments on
the page. Howe’s own ‘American aesthetic of uncertainty,’
shuttles among forms, genres, and states of matter. What connects
it all are Howe’s powers of in, and the implied relations
between her sparkling trouvailles.”
- Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
“Susan Howe is our great poetic chronicler of what it means to
dwell in possibility, to live on the Edge.”
- Marjorie Perloff
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About the Author
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Susan Howe has won the Bollingen Prize, the Frost
Medal, and the Griffin Award. She is the author of such seminal
works as Debths, ThatThis, TheMidnight, MyEmilyDickinson,
TheQuarry, and TheBirthmark.
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