"A child is very ill; there is a hospital. . . . The subject is as basic as a bowl and a nail, wood and a house, and a house on fire." --Fanny Howe, from the introduction

"House and Fire" is a mother's love song to her stricken young son, written over the years of his hospitalizations for an acute immune disorder. Maria Hummel is a poet of dazzling formal mastery, whose eerie, radiant lyrics and stories evoke the pediatric ward, California life, and the immortal, endangered world of childhood. This unforgettable debut was selected by Fanny Howe.

From "House and Fire":

"for thirty-three years"

"I didn't make anything"

"with my body"

"and thenyour brother"

"and thenhe sickened"

"watching him sleephooked to tubes"

"an empty envelopeinside me"

"fills each dawnwith one long love letter"

"by night"

"it's mostly apology"

A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Maria Hummel is the author of two novels and poetry and prose in "Poetry," "Narrative," and "The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine." She teaches at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco, California.

Fanny Howe has written many books of poetry, and her "Selected Poems" (UC Press, 2000) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

"Ilona Karmel once wrote of the work of turning 'the cold, old-fashioned, iron key of memory.' These recovered poems of Ilona and her elder sister Henia open the space behind memory's door, and it is on fire with defiant passion -with longing, with terror, and the raw drive to bear witness in the one way possible to the life-in-death of the camps. Henia writes, 'These poems came about when I was still creating myself.' The two sisters here are speaking themselves and each other into existence; and this essential work of claiming our humanity has rarely been so costly, and so moving."--Allen Grossman
"The book is a riveting read. The subject, of course, is very compelling and the poems move with great plainness, vividness, and force. The girls survived, though barely, because they were young and strong and because the German war machine needed their bodies. The book is artfully designed to convey the arc of their story from capture to freedom in 1946, and there is, as far as I know, nothing quite like it in the vast literature of the Holocaust. A unique and moving book, of historical significance, rendered into English by one of our most gifted American poets."--Robert Hass

This stunning second collection engages the "disciplines" associated with regimes of powers and sadomasochism. The work interrogates the social and linguistic space between regimes of power enacted on the body, and thereby the soul.

Beautiful essays by Fanny Howe, a poet praised for her "private quest through the metaphysical universe . . . the results are startling and honest" ("The New York Times Book Review") Fanny Howe's richly contemplative "The Winter Sun "is a collection of essays on childhood, language, and meaning by one of America's most original contemporary poets.

Through a collage of reflections on people, places, and times that have been part of her life, Howe shows the origins and requirements of "a vocation that has no name." She finds proof of this in the lives of others--Jacques Lusseyran, who, though blind, wrote about his inner vision, surviving inside a concentration camp during World War II; the Scottish nun Sara Grant and Abbe Dubois, both of whom lived extensively in India where their vocation led them; the English novelists Antonia White and Emily Bronte; and the fifth-century philosopher and poet Bharthari. With interludes referring to her own place and situation, Howe makes this book into a Progress rather than a memoir.

"The Winter Sun "displays the same power as found in her highly praised collection of essays, "The Wedding Dress," a book described by James Carroll as an "unflinching but exhilarating look at real religion, the American desolation, a woman's life, and, always, the redemption of literature."

"Fanny Howe draws the reader into her meditations on spiritual illuminations with a simplicity and an originality of vision and style that I find in no other contemporary work dealing with mysticism."--Etel Adnan, poet and author of "The Spring Flowers Own & the Manifestation of the Voyage

"Here we reach the quick: the cutting edge between faith and fiction. These are not sentences, they are surgical incisions; the whole book a signpost for the new century."--Mark Patrick Hederman, Irish Benedictine monk and author of "Tarot, Talisman or Taboo

""The Wedding Dress is the precious end product of an unique sensibility that combines faith, wisdom, experience and an uncompromising pursuit of beauty and truth."--Piers Paul Read, author of "The Templars and "Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

"This is an ax of a book, like Kafka's, breaking through the ice of received wisdom, fake attitudes, piety. An unflinching but exhilarating look at real religion, the American desolation, a woman's life, and, always, the redemption of literature. The sharpened edge is Fanny Howe's love of the truth, which (after cutting) does indeed set free."--James Carroll, author of "Constantine's Sword and "Secret Father

"Fanny Howe's latest book is a primer for the mind America does not know it has. Her prose is utterly simple and truthful yet rings with the formal elegance of past centuries. These pages are a dazzling handbook on the riddles of language, breath and speech. At every moment in the book Fanny is present, precise, mischievous, awesome, a companion in arms to her readers. When she turns with us to address the Unknown, she brings us face to face as no other writer I know can do."--Mark JayMirsky, editor of the journal "Fiction

"This is, without exaggeration, an extraordinary book. The essays have the concentration and obliquity and suggestiveness of prose poems. The sentences are characteristically short and direct, grammatically simple and seemingly to the point. But so much thinking and responding and feeling have been distilled into these deceptively straightforward statements that they often have the tantalizing and paradoxical witchery of runes. There is no one else like Fanny Howe on the contemporary literary scene."--Albert Gelpi, Stanford University

"An important book for anyone interested in contemporary literature and the role of the artist in the present. These essays on the art enact a vital intervention with race, gender, faith, motherhood, and poetry. Fanny Howe uses Doubt to smash conventional systems of belief and Bewilderment to investigate political injustice and to shape a humane response, displaying an embodied wisdom that is both brilliantly articulate and precariously lived."--Peter Gizzi, author of "Artificial Heart

"I have never before had such a physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual experience while reading one book. Fanny Howe makes words reality, thought beauty, and learning meditation. I went with her from 'Bewilderment' to agreeing that this book is 'a path' and 'like a plot--once formed, it seems to welcome and pull you into it.' And I am grateful."--Frances Smith Foster, author of "Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892

"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's strangely hushed but busy landscape keeps leading us into it until we realize we're lost but wouldn't want to be anywhere else. This book is a strange joy."--John Ashbery

"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