That This

By Susan Howe

"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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811219186
• ISBN13: 9780811219181
• Release Date: December 2010
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 7.6" x 8.8"