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
“Howe’s poetry makes clear that [the notion that robots and software will soon replace us] is based upon a very limited conception of what it is to be a human. We are complex. We are mysterious. We don’t make sense. We do make sense. You will lose and you will find yourself in her words.”—Claire-Louise Bennett
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.
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About the Author
Credit: Credit: Michael Avedon
Praise
“This Poor Book is a testament to Fanny Howe’s life and writing. In it, she wields her powers of perception for a long poem that turns inward on the self and out at the world and in every other direction the poet can imagine with lines that speak directly and always suggest more than they say.”—Jericho Brown
“Fanny Howe gathers the scattered constellations of her astonishing life work and forges them into a single unwavering spiritual reckoning. At the dynamic center of the poem, a live beating heart moves through a fractured world. . . . This Poor Book is for the ages.”—Peter Gizzi
“This Poor Book is an astonishing document by an irreplaceable poet. . . . Fanny Howe’s last work captures the brutality and beauty of the modern world better than almost anything else I’ve read.”—Maggie Millner
“Through Fanny Howe’s eyes we look at life differently. . . . Who else could turn things upside down with such a sleight of hand? This Poor Book reads like the testament of a newly discovered life-form, offering vital messages from the past and into the future.”—Celia Paul
