Keynote
Celebrated poet Fanny Howe’s final book, a kaleidoscopic recasting of her twenty-first-century poems
Book Title
This Poor Book
Subtitle
A Poem
Cover Image
“Fanny Howe is a titan. Absolutely nobody writes like her. Nobody sounds like her. This Poor Book is a miracle she left for us.”—Kaveh Akbar
Poem Excerpt
“Granny, why don’t we leave?”
Look down onto the street
at the children
with their heads shaved
and their skin too white.
Do you want to leave
this house and join the war,
my dark-eyed child?
“No, grandmother.”
Let’s pull down the shade then.
Open this poor book and read.
—from This Poor Book
Look down onto the street
at the children
with their heads shaved
and their skin too white.
Do you want to leave
this house and join the war,
my dark-eyed child?
“No, grandmother.”
Let’s pull down the shade then.
Open this poor book and read.
—from This Poor Book
Body
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.
List Price
$18.00
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About the Author
Credit: Lynn Christoffers
Praise
- “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.”—Rae Armantrout
