by Austin Farrell
May 5, 2026
This Poor Book by Fanny Howe; Graywolf Press; 144 pages; $18.00.
It’s not every day one encounters a poet as original and innovative as Fanny Howe who has constantly reinvented herself throughout her career. She has received major honors for both her poetry and prose as well as praise from major poets such as John Ashbery and Jorie Graham. So it comes as no surprise that her final work, This Poor Book, a book-length poem published posthumously by Graywolf Press, leaves us with yet another jewel to marvel upon. Constructed primarily from poems published over the past 25 years with a few new ones sprinkled in, Howe has given us a new and refreshing genre bender that reads like a versified journal. Through her speaker’s experiences as a worldly vagabond, readers will ponder the concept of faith as it relates to the sufferings of the oppressed, particularly women and children, in a century that resembles “a director who prefers his script to his actors.”
Howe is a poet of possibility, constantly pushing against the limitations of language and form to unveil more elusive truths in her subjects. This Poor Book is no exception as she leads us on a pilgrimage populated with the downtrodden, causing flux between faith and doubt (“Did I have faith or was it hype”). This effect is derived from Howe’s careful selection of previous poems that best represent her journey with faith. In this manner, the book rejects the classification of being another selected works lauding her strongest pieces over the years. It is more an experiment, a practice in transcendence, where Howe is able to measure her faith by reexamining the past, creating a narrative of faith rather than just a path to it.
The arrangement of these poems, unbounded by their previous titles, evokes a rhythm that mirrors that flux, destabilizing her speaker’s faith again and again in the face of atrocities such as war and industrialized livestock production (“Can we breed lambs/ without seeing meat?). The result is a propulsive and seamless reconfiguration of faith through personal reflection and observations in nature that culminate into an understanding of what makes faith possible. For Howe, the answer is smallness, a quality shared by both the impoverished and nature in a society where “the repetition of the same problem is getting exhausting.”
Early in This Poor Book, Howe quotes the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Philosophy should only be written as poetry.” Howe asks the reader to relate the need for density and resonance within a philosophical framework, not just logic and argument. This is imperative of Howe’s poetics as it relates to theology – the author seeks to restore divinity as a force within nature intrinsic to itself, rejecting a singular and dogmatic conception of God that has more in common with empire than paradise (“Money has always/ Been huge and out of sight like God/ Who does not exist but is.”). Howe edifies our own perceptions through her imaginative lyrics so that we may also see “fire in wood and words in smoke.” Despite her Catholic beliefs, she retains an idiosyncratic outlook on spirituality that resonates more with Spinozian pantheism, seeking to establish God as a substance that unifies all matter. It follows that beauty in such a theology is inextricably linked to suffering, instilling courage in Howe’s speaker and ultimately securing her faith (“Double the beautiful/Because they are so little”).
This Poor Book is remarkable not just for Howe’s fragmentary depictions of reality, but the modulations of her speaker’s tone that score them with human dignity. A sense of humility permeates throughout her meditations, punctuated by a playful verse invoking children’s rhymes. It balances the darker portrayals of human suffering with a levity that prevents the work’s scope from becoming dominantly serious. Faith becomes synonymous with courage, allowing her to unabashedly clown about her subjects as she does when she renames the days of the week (“Man Day, Dues Day, Wine Day”). She’s never afraid to turn that same lens on her her own suffering, finding comfort in her own inadequacy:
Give me my shawl, my corkscrew
And my cloth bag.
Give me my hot water bottle and my book.
Give me my stick and my water.
One shoe for walking and one to dance.
No stability. Thirst.
Through Howe’s meditations, readers will find beauty in the smallness of our lives enveloped by a civilization that seeks to institutionalize our consciousness and imaginative capabilities. It’s hard not to feel christened after closing This Poor Book, a timeless work that reminds us of our own fragmented realities, how its reconstructions of the past can renew hope in the present and onward.
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Practicing Transcendence: Faith and Doubt in Fanny Howe’s This Poor Book
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Engin Akyurt from Pexels
Austin Farrell is a poet from Moro, Arkansas. He received an MFA from The University of Michigan where he was a Zell Fellow. He is an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review.
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© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
© 2026 Iron Oak Editions
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