Selected Poems

by Fanny Howe

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520222636
• ISBN13: 9780520222632
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 213 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.9" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The assembled wonder

The title of this book deceives. Indeed it is a "selected" but is no mere anthology of works. The poems are chosen from books spanning decades, but are re-ordered, re-sequenced, in some cases even excerpted out of longer poems to create a new--completely new--book.The poems are kept short. The compression serves to lull but release power at the same time. Imagine Fanny Howe whispering visions in your ear while you are in the dream-state between sleeping and waking.I love Fanny Howe because she has simultaneous concerns that never outweigh each other: a commitment to a first-person lyric while engaging the experiments of modernism and language-poetics, a mystical attention to religious experience coupled with a very real and political engagement with daily material condition, a fiesty resistance to form, but a conquest of that same territory.