Pierce-Arrow

With her first book of new poems in six years, Howe further solidifies her reputation as one of North Americas foremost experimental writers. Pierce-Arrow engages many of the elements and themes that have consistently appeared in both her poetry (The Europe of Trusts, etc.) and prose (My Emily Dickinson and The Birth Mark). Here, as in previous work, the manuscripts and marginalia of marginal and anti-institutional authors (with an emphasis on women writers) are seamlessly brought together with historiography and lyricand the results continue to be arresting. The focal points of this book are the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and his wife Juliette, whose full birth name and ancestry remain to this day somewhat of a mystery. For Howe, this mystery becomes a subtle metaphor for the frequently secondary quality the lives of women can take on in male-dominated milieux, literary or otherwise. The books first section, Arisbe, consists of a biographical essay and poems that touch on various aspects of Peirces life and work. The second, The Leisure of the Theory Class, is a long series of poems that tightly interweave references to Peirce, Juliette, George Meredith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Charles Dickens, Edmund Husserls manuscripts, Alexander Popes translation of the Iliad and George Santayana, to name only the most prominent and explicit references. Reading and writing between the lines of history, Howe blurs the boundaries between individuals, texts and historical events. Though some of these relations may not appear obvious at first, they strengthenwhile continuing to proliferateas the poems unfold. The concluding Rckenfigur, a series of ghostly love poems, centers around the tragic myth of Tristram and Isolde. More overtly lyrical than the poems in the rest of the book, they provide a strong conclusion to one of Howes most significant works. (June)