This Poor Book - Softcover

Fanny Howe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1068439556 ISBN 13: 9781068439551

Publisher: Divided Publishing, 2026

Synopsis

'I remember a child who licked up the mist on the windowpane to see eternity.'

For decades, Fanny Howe has been the great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she made a selection of her writing from the last thirty years, including new and revised poems, and arranged them into a single, astonishing work. Across this brilliant reconfiguration, 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."

About this title

About the Author

Fanny Howe was born on 15 October 1940 in Buffalo, New York. She was professor emerita in literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of more than fifty books of poetry and prose. Howe taught literature and writing throughout her life and mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical thinking. She died on 8 July 2025 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Divided Publishing
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1068439556
• ISBN 13: 9781068439551
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144