New and Selected Poems

Praise for Marie Howe

“[Howe] specializes in vibrant, bracing, haunting work that stops you in your tracks.”
—New York Times

“Marie Howe writes poems with a clarity that approaches sunlight, shining her gaze into underlit places.… Howe’s gift is to render ordinary moments as bright epiphanies.”
—Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle

“Marie Howe is among our most gifted poets of trauma and healing, and of where the everyday encounters the world of the sacred.”
—Alicia Ostriker

“A poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation.”
—Boston Globe

“Marie Howe has always come as close as any poet since Rilke to touching eternity, simply by stretching out her hand and believing that something exists beyond her grasp, beyond her knowing.”
—Nick Flynn

“Howe is a truth-teller of the first order. Fearless in presenting unfiltered experiences, she interweaves her simple, economical language into long, subordinated sentences, loose, enjambed couplets that spill compellingly down the page with near-invisible artistry.”
—Providence Sunday Journal

“Each book of Marie Howe’s is a singular accomplishment.… How does she see with such devastating clarity? Or allow so much of ‘what the living do’ onto the page: avoidance, longing, tenderness, resentment and desire?”
—Mark Doty

“If you think poetry can’t do much for you, that it doesn't have anything to do with your life as you live it, you haven’t been exposed to Marie Howe.”
—Elizabeth Berg

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).