When do we risk happiness? When do we risk encounter? How can reading offer those things now? Howe's books may accompany you in these questions. They may also make you long for the smell of libraries, for the humming quiet of reading rooms, the gentle rustle of others turning pages, too. Howe writes against a world that disappears too far away online, in which we lose the bodily perception of space, the tenderness of touch. In this era of social distancing, I felt the prick of these poems: They urged me towards aliveness.
COMMENT
Howe's collage poems evoke a sensory experience of the library as place. "We need to see and touch objects and documents," Howe writes, and the reviewer agrees.
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