“Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty. Like stained glass, her writing awaits illumination, but it is important not to flood them with a klieg light. . . . It is marvelous to think of these works as having been made not in some bower but in the midst of life.”
Manimal Woe
by Fanny Howe
Fanny Howe's Manimal Woe maps the intersection between history and family as few books have. Through poetry, prose, and primary sources, Howe invites us on a journey with the spirit of her father, Civil Rights lawyer and professor Mark DeWolfe Howe, who died suddenly in 1967. The past, both personal and historical, is utterly present, yet just out of reach. From her ancestors’ dark legacy as slave traders, to her father’s work during the Civil Rights era, to her own interracial marriage and family, Fanny Howe delves deep into the heart of the mysterious and the mystical, and emerges with the questions that so rarely find their way to us.
Fanny Howe
Fanny Howe is the author of more than thirty works of poetry and prose, including Love and I, The Needle's Eye, Come and See, and The Winter Sun. Howe was the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She also won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems, and has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice.
