That This

26 July 2011

Susan Howe (Author), James Welling (Photographer)

Description

Susan Howe’s newest book of poetry is a revelation as well as a mystery.

"What treasures of knowledge we cluster around." That This is a collection in three pieces. "Disappearance Approach," an essay about Howe's husband's sudden death—"land of darkness or darkness itself you shadow mouth"—begins the book with paintings by Poussin, an autopsy, Sarah Edwards and her sister-in-law Hannah, phantoms, and elusive remnants. "Frolic Architecture," the second section—inspired by visits to the vast 18th-century Jonathan Edwards archives at the Beinecke and accompanied by six photograms by James Welling—presents hauntingly lovely, oblique type-collages of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary entries that Howe (with scissors, "invisible" Scotch Tape, and a Canon copier) has twisted, flattened, and snipped into inscapes of force. The final section, "That This," delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal, with their orderly appearance packing startling power:

     That this book is a history of
     a shadow that is a shadow of

     Me mystically one in another
     another another to subserve.

Reviews

"For nearly thirty years, Howe has occupied a particular and invaluable place in American poetry. She's a rigorously skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose demystifying intelligence is matched by a passionate embrace of poetry's rejuvenating power." — John Palattella, The Boston Review

"An important voice in contemporary literature, a signal inheritor of an American poetic tradition. Like Dickinson, her Massachusetts muse, Howe turns the English of a self steeped in books such that every word, as in Scripture, glows with an almost moral quality." — Artforum

"Monomania has its rewards—an incantatory power that shines through. Howe's images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie sharing of ghosts half-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest." — Kirkus Reviews

Also By: Susan Howe

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New Directions, Lydia Davis, Eliot Weinberger, Susan Howe, Bernadette Mayer, Sylvia Legris
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Spontaneous Particulars: Telepathy of Archives
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Originally a cloth coedition with the Christine Burgin Gallery, this rapturous hymn to discoveries and archives is now a paperback
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A new poetry book by Susan Howe is always an event
The Birth-mark: Essays
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Susan Howe's classic groundbreaking exploration of early American literature.
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Winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize