Keynote
A spiritually resonant and politically urgent new collection by the winner of the Lenore Marshall poetry prize
Book Title
On the Ground
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “Fanny Howe’s new collection confirms that she’s one of the boldest lyric poets in the United States. . . Her bracing new poems respond with moving clarity to the contrast between current political tides and the realities of life lived ‘on the ground.’”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
Body
My father was a soldier
who was smaller than my son
when he returned as a ghost.
I begged him to stay with us
but he said: "Not until you come to life."
—from "[Untitled]"
Fanny Howe's bold new collection responds to the contrast between American imperialist goals and the realities of life lived "on the ground." While our minds are preoccupied with the war games on television, we go on living among our ordinary joys and appetites. How can we live under these dissonant conditions and reconcile our existence with our longings?
who was smaller than my son
when he returned as a ghost.
I begged him to stay with us
but he said: "Not until you come to life."
—from "[Untitled]"
Fanny Howe's bold new collection responds to the contrast between American imperialist goals and the realities of life lived "on the ground." While our minds are preoccupied with the war games on television, we go on living among our ordinary joys and appetites. How can we live under these dissonant conditions and reconcile our existence with our longings?
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About the Author
Credit: Credit: Michael Avedon
Praise
- “Simultaneously tender, political, lyrical and global in scope.”—Publishers Weekly
- “Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the ‘city on a hill.’ Writes Emerson, ‘The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.’ Here’s the luminous and incontrovertible proof.”—Michael Palmer
- “In Fanny Howe’s economics of language, similes just won’t do because they produce an unreal world where the poor don’t exist, a place that allows us to think of ‘Utah as if it was Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.’ If Camp X-Ray at Guatanamo Bay is a grotesque stand-in for the present and future of ‘security’ clamed without justice, Fanny Howe turns her own x-ray vision to the things of this world and the constant presence of death beyond a deer stopped in its tracks, London’s chill, the fragility of skin, or the ‘rape robe of war’ that shrouds us all to differing degrees.”—Ammiel Alcalay
