Debths

Author(s): Susan Howe

Poetry | New Directions

A collection in five parts, Susan Howe's electrifying new book opens with a preface by the poet that lays out some of Debths' inspirations: the art of Paul Thek, the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, and early American writings; and in it she also addresses memory's threads and galaxies, "the rule of remoteness," and "the luminous story surrounding all things noumenal."


Following the preface are four sections of poetry: "Titian Air Vent," "Tom Tit Tot" (her newest collage poems), "Periscope," and "Debths." As always with Howe, Debths brings "a not-being-in-the-no."

Review: "A fresh occasion not just to celebrate Howe, who turned seventy-eight this year, but also to read her anew, which is the more formidable and ultimately more rewarding charge. Wildly and wantonly she is bringing everything to the table, including poetry, history, research, politics, autobiography, imagination, obsession and love, all the while demonstrating how strange, puzzling, and untamed writing and thinking can be." -- Maggie Nelson - Artforum "Definition of poetry as the intersection of sight, sound, and sense." -- Christopher Higgs - Big Other "Monomania has its rewards-an incantatory power that shines through. Howe's images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie shading of ghosts half-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest." -- Kirkus Reviews "Howe's telepathic poetry is also the most attentive to materiality: handwriting, spacing, the slightest fold or crevice which might contain fragments, marginalia, a scribble of poesy. And that's just it-Howe's attention is the essential rigor of all poetry." -- Literary Hub "For nearly thirty years, Howe has occupied a particular and invaluable place in American poetry. She's a rigorously skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose demystifying intelligence is matched by a passionate embrace of poetry's rejuvenating power." -- John Palattella - The Boston Review "Susan Howe is our great poetic chronicler of what it means to dwell in possibility, to live on the Edge." -- Marjorie Perloff


 


 


Author Biography: Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and two of literary criticism, Susan Howe's recent collection of poems That This, published by New Directions won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Three CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, Thiefth, Souls of the Labadie Tract, and Frolic Architecture were released on the Blue Chopsticks label (2005; 2011). Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and served as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets between 2000-2006. In fall, 2009 she was awarded a Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin. Grenfell Press published a fine press edition of "Frolic Architecture with photographic prints by James Welling in 2009. Recently she was an Artist In Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In October, 2013 her word collages were exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the Whitney Biennial Spring, 2014. A limited press edition of Tom Tit Tot (the word collages which amount to a series poem) with art work by R.H. Quaytman has just been published by MoMA in New York, and Spontaneous Particulars:The Telepathy of Archives, (2014) published by Christine Burgin and New Directions.


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9780811226851
  • : New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • : New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • : January 2017
  • : 22.90 cmmm X 15.20 cmmm X 1.30 cmmm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Susan Howe
  • : Paperback
  • : 1710
  • : en
  • : 144