New and Selected Poems
by Marie Howe
Summary
Drawing on four decades of work across four previous collections—including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting elegy for her brother who died of AIDS, and Magdalene (2017)—alongside twenty new poems, this volume reveals Howe's lifelong commitment to radical plainness in the face of mortality, grief, and the sacred. The Pulitzer committee honored it for mining 'the day to day modern experience for evidence of our shared loneliness, mortality, and holiness.' Howe's compressed lyric voice locates the transcendent in the most ordinary domestic moments, resisting both sentimentality and grandeur.
Historical Context & Significance
The first collected edition of Howe's career; readers had long considered What the Living Do one of the essential American elegies, and this gathering gave them the full arc of a poet widely considered underrecognized relative to her influence.