Gone—Poems

"With extraordinary self-scrutiny and complexity--unmatchable musical poise and beauty--Fanny Howe examines our relationship with 'other' worlds, purgatories of various kinds: genetic, historical, theological. She writes from a world where hell is as close as God, or family, or love, where nothing happens that can, her syntax doubling back, as though it were possible by such formal and linguistic means to transform doubt into faith. It is a wonder to watch this poet try to decipher error with the knowledge that each error is necessary and the only guide is disguised as love. Heart, come along and be as heartless/ as you know you are, she tells us. Work this honest is rare indeed."--Jorie Graham

"Howe's new volume is a double-edged sword: in it she creates beauty and questions it, pursues faith and lives with doubt, finds love and finds hate there waiting. Her book 'transverberates' with all the paradoxes at 'the crux/of the huddle.' Howe is always an unpretentious pilgrim 'shinnying up the silence' into ever thinner atmospheres. I trust her as much as I have ever trusted anyone."--Rae Armantrout, author of Veil: New and Selected Poems

"Fanny Howe's poems travel through stations, agonies, and intoxications to build a phenomenology of spirits. Her language lays bare the human condition of vision and unknowing, inheritance and reinvention. These impish devotions move holy and astray."--Elizabeth Willis, author of The Human Abstract

Fanny Howe is Professor Emeritus of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and poetry, including Indivisible (2001), Selected Poems (California, 2000), and One Crossed Out (1998).