Selected Poems

"This complexly articulate writer uses poetry as a final resource. All the authority of her power becomes explicit in these poems, the musing, twisting thoughts and persons woven into a meld of great force and beauty. This is life if it could speak. Here it does."--Robert Creeley

"Fanny Howe is a sly, wicked poet, always shifting between the social, the political, as well as the linguistic and literary concerns of an artist always writing from the cutting edge."--Quincy Troupe

"Fanny Howe is the closest thing to Emily Dickinson since Dickinson herself. These taut and sometimes witty poems are centripetal; they inscribe moments of a spiritual and psychological quest, word by packed word, image by edged image."--Albert Gelpi, Stanford University

"Fanny Howe writes against the grain of language and the mind. These serial works, collected from a lifetime's steady contemplation, weave piece by piece a texture of such difficulty. Most religious poetry stands on faith, emotion, or certainty; Howe's work begins and ends with questions, and immense interiority in the shape of the physical world itself."--Norman Fischer, Co-abbot, San Francisco Zen Center

"Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the 'city on a hill.' Writes Emerson, 'The poet is the sayer, the namer,and represents beauty.' Here's the luminous and incontrovertible proof." --Michael Palmer, author of "The Lion Bridge Less