Fanny Howe - Böcker

One of the best and most respected experimental poets in the United States, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books, mostly with small presses, and this publication of her selected poems is a major event. Howe's theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation. Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, is the home of O'Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems. The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe's unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul: Zero built a nest in my navel. Incurable Longing. Blood too-- From violent actions It's a nest belonging to one But zero uses it And its pleasure is its own --from The Quietist

This collection of new poems by one of the most respected poets in the United States uses motifs of advance and recovery, doubt and conviction - in an emotional relation to the known world. Heralded as 'one of our most vital, unclassifiable writers' by the "Voice Literary Supplement", Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books and is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her "Selected Poems" received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the Most Outstanding Book of Poetry Published in 2000 from the Academy of American Poets. The poems in "Gone" describe the transit of a psyche, driven by uncertainty and by love, through various stations and experiences. This volume of short poems and one lyrical essay, all written in the last five years, is broken into five parts; and the longest of these, "The Passion," consecrates the contradictions between these two emotions. "The New York Times" Book Review said, 'Howe has made a long-term project of trying to determine how we fit into God's world, and her aim is both true and marvellously free of sentimental piety'.With "Gone", readers will have the opportunity to experience firsthand Howe's continuation of that elusive and fascinating endeavor.

In times of great uncertainty, the urgency of the artist's task is only surpassed by its difficulty. Ours is such a time, and rising to the challenge, novelist and poet Fanny Howe suggests new and fruitful ways of thinking about both the artist's role and the condition of doubt. In these original meditations on bewilderment, motherhood, imagination, and art-making, Howe takes on conventional systems of belief and argues for another, brave way of proceeding. In the essays 'Immanence' and 'Work and Love' and those on writers such as Carmelite nun Edith Stein, French mystic Simone Weil, Thomas Hardy, and Ilona Karmel - who were particularly affected by political, philosophical, and existential events in the twentieth century - she directly engages questions of race, gender, religion, faith, language, and political thought and, in doing so, expands the field of the literary essay. A richly evocative memoir, "Seeing Is Believing", situates Howe's own domestic and political life in Boston in the late '60s and early '70s within the broader movement for survival and social justice in the face of that city's racism.Whether discussing Weil, Stein, Meister Eckhart, Saint Teresa, Samuel Beckett, or Lady Wilde, Howe writes with consummate authority and grace, turning bewilderment into a lens and a light for finding our way.

In this brilliant work that transcends genre—lyric essay, prose poem, philosophical fiction—Fanny Howe pursues her realization that keen metaphysical inquiry is radically essential to everyday life.

Radical Love gathers five of Fanny Howe's novels: Nod, The Deep North, Famous Questions, Saving History, and Indivisible, previously out-of-print and hard to find classics whose characters wrestle with serious political and metaphysical questions against the backdrop of urban, suburban, and rural America.

Fanny Howe's richly contemplative The Winter Sun is a collection of essays on childhood, language and meaning by one of America's most original contemporary poets. Through a collage of reflections on people, places and times that have been part of her life, she shows the origins and requirements of a vocation that has no name'. She finds proof of this in the lives of others - including Jacques Lusseyran, Scottish nun Sara Grant, Abbe Dubois, Antonia White and Emily Bronte.'