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kell_xavi's review
hopeful
reflective
sad
5.0
These poems are stories, divided into three sections: from childhood to a brother’s sickness from AIDs to an adulthood touched by love and grief. These are minimal poems, snippets that shine like light through water with clarity, poise, epiphanies like trinkets lined up on a windowsill.
Howe writes about misogyny, sexual trauma and incest, companionship between siblings, the creases and rooms of memory. She writes about fatigue, romance, missing someone not yet gone, about winter and grave sites. She writes about remembering, loving, needing, regretting, holding on as an opening as well as a closure. I was less moved by the final section, but I think part of the reason is that it chronicles middle age, places I haven’t reached yet.
The poems in What the Living Do offer, through memory and reflection, a mundane deliverance from hopelessness, into a sort of future not quite anticipated, but nonetheless allowed to breathe.
My favourites:
The Boy
Howe writes about misogyny, sexual trauma and incest, companionship between siblings, the creases and rooms of memory. She writes about fatigue, romance, missing someone not yet gone, about winter and grave sites. She writes about remembering, loving, needing, regretting, holding on as an opening as well as a closure. I was less moved by the final section, but I think part of the reason is that it chronicles middle age, places I haven’t reached yet.
The poems in What the Living Do offer, through memory and reflection, a mundane deliverance from hopelessness, into a sort of future not quite anticipated, but nonetheless allowed to breathe.
My favourites:
The Boy
Sixth Grade
Practicing
The Mother
The Attic
The Girl
How Some of It Happened
The Promise
The Grave
My Dead Friends
Content Warnings
Moderate: Alcoholism, Death, Incest, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Rape, Sexual violence, and Terminal illness