Misha Honcharenko: 'Lyric Risk: On Fanny Howe'

This Poor Book. A Poem, by Fanny Howe. Divided Publishing, 2026, 144pp., £11.99

To write about This Poor Book, the final work completed by Fanny Howe before her death last year, is to address a threshold. The book stands at the edge of a long and singular literary life. For decades, Howe was recognised as a poet of holy disorientation and exacting conscience—a writer for whom bewilderment was not a weakness but a spiritual method. With this final gathering of writing from the last thirty years, she does not curate a retrospective. Instead, she composes a last interior movement, a turning inward that feels less like summation than distillation.

The title itself gestures toward renunciation. The word “poor” carries Franciscan overtones: emptied, unadorned, spiritually open. The book is not impoverished but stripped. In holding it, we feel Howe testing once more what language can bear when it is pressed against anguish, faith, childhood memory, political violence, exile, and that most ungovernable force — love.

Throughout her career, Howe wrote from displacement — geographic, theological, emotional. Her work emerged from the civil rights era, from a Catholic imagination saturated in mysticism yet resistant to doctrinal certainty. A 2019 profile in The New Yorker emphasised her lifelong preoccupation with beginnings and endings, with thresholds where identity loosens and reforms. That preoccupation finds an austere clarity here. The poems do not resolve; they hover.

One of the early pieces in the collection offers a stark maritime image:

It is silhouette
and there is the child again,
now attached to the boat.
All black.
Look at the weather,
the futile wipers beating!

The silhouette — “All black” — registers simultaneously as memory and erasure. Howe’s recurring figure of the child appears once more, but never as sentimental innocence. In her work, the child is exposure itself: the unshielded self-confronting forces it cannot comprehend. The windshield wipers beating against the storm evoke consciousness straining for clarity in conditions that resist it. Vision is partial; understanding is obstructed.

The child is “attached to the boat,” not steering it. This distinction matters. Attachment without agency mirrors Howe’s understanding of historical existence. We are borne along by weather — by political catastrophe, by inherited trauma, by theological doubt. The soul drifts in silhouette. Howe has always insisted on obscurity as a necessary condition of faith. Here, that obscurity becomes maritime and unstable. No one commands the rudder.

A second poem intensifies this mood of frozen inheritance:

The sky is a fish packed in ice.
There is a low sun
and stiff silver wands on the horizon
and the rudder groans
as the father and the ghost pass on.

The metaphor of the sky as “a fish packed in ice” is at once visceral and metaphysical. A fish preserved in ice is suspended between life and decay — caught, immobilised, awaiting consumption. The sky itself becomes refrigerated, halted. Death and preservation merge.

With the line “the father and the ghost pass on”, Howe’s Catholic sensibility surfaces not as dogma but as echo — the Father and the Holy Ghost transmuted into generational departure. The rudder groans, suggesting that steering through legacy is an effortful, painful task. Inheritance is not triumphant; it creaks. Theology in Howe’s late work becomes atmosphere — pervasive but unsettled. The sacred is present as absence.

Political violence, too, infiltrates the domestic and the spiritual. In one of the book’s most devastating scenes, Howe writes:

A boy reads about war
in bed with his grandmother.
She keeps getting up to look out.
What she sees horrifies her.
That’s why she pulls the curtains
to protect the love she can’t carry down.

Here war enters the bedroom. The grandmother’s repeated rising suggests vigilance, dread, helplessness. She draws the curtains not because it will stop the horror but because love requires the gesture. Howe’s lifelong engagement with injustice — from civil rights activism to the Iraq War — never becomes slogan or manifesto. Instead, violence appears obliquely, filtered through familial tenderness.

Elsewhere in the collection she notes the boots of soldiers who died in Iraq, “dirty and curled at the toes.” The detail is ordinary and unbearable. Howe’s method is restraint: she does not narrate the battle; she gives us the empty boots. The moral weight falls on what remains after the body is gone.

Time itself is rendered with equal severity. In a brief, piercing stanza she writes:

Time is so intimate.
Then it is finished
and on you go burning to a cinder.

Few poets have written about temporality with such compressed force. Time is intimate — close to the body, interwoven with consciousness. And yet it ends without ceremony. The phrase “burning to a cinder” evokes both annihilation and purification. Fire recurs throughout Howe’s work as destructive and revelatory. The line’s starkness refuses consolation. Intimacy does not shield us from extinction; it intensifies it.

Howe’s attention to language itself — its fractures and etymologies — appears in one of the book’s most formally striking passages:

One word that contains
so many:
dearth, end, earth, ear, dirt, hen, red, dish, it and
I must examine each part
then cut the ropes without a heart and set out

The word remains unnamed, but its fragments orbit around “death” and “earth.” Howe disassembles language as if excavating a burial site. Words are not stable; they are sedimented histories. By breaking them apart, she exposes their hidden correspondences. “Dirt” and “red,” “end” and “earth” — mortality embedded in sound.

The final line — “cut the ropes without a heart and set out” — suggests renunciation. To cut ropes is to leave harbor, to accept exposure. The phrase “without a heart” does not imply cruelty but a necessary stripping away of sentimentality. Howe has always resisted easy emotion. Feeling, in her poetry, must be tested against silence.

The closing section of the book, titled “Wood,” returns to elemental imagery. Wood carries biblical resonance — the cross, the ark, the coffin — but also the ordinary textures of furniture and forest. In one of the most startling passages, she writes:

Let mud and ink stiffen
on the same sheet.
Let the lamb shit on the cross
And the pen cut the butcher.
Let a fire blow and warm
The revolutionaries.

The mingling of mud and ink collapses purity into earthiness. Writing is not transcendent; it is sullied. The shocking image of the lamb destabilizes conventional piety. Howe refuses to sentimentalize sacrifice. The cross is not ornamental; it is implicated in waste and violence. Yet the stanza does not end in desecration. Fire warms the revolutionaries. Destruction becomes heat, possibility.

This fusion of mysticism and political consciousness has defined Howe’s lifetime achievement. Her faith was never withdrawn from the world’s suffering. Nor was her politics severed from contemplation. She believed that philosophy should be written as poetry — that thought without lyric risk is inert.

In the “Wood” poems, she turns explicitly to the soul:

You have to care for your soul
because time is transparent
and slides between you and your soul
when someone else has it.

Time here becomes thief. The soul is not self-contained; it is porous, vulnerable to others. Howe goes further, asking whether a portion of the soul, once lost, can “grow back.” Love, in this late articulation, is not possession but exposure. It costs.

The book closes with a line that reads like distilled theology:

Love is a movement towards pity.

This definition is radical in its humility. Love is not ecstasy or dominance; it is a bending toward another’s fragility. The statement resonates with Howe’s lifelong engagement with mystics such as Simone Weil, for whom attention itself was a form of grace. Pity here does not mean condescension but shared vulnerability.

Reading This Poor Book after Howe’s death, reported in The New York Times in 2025, inevitably inflects the volume with valedictory weight. Yet the poems resist closure. They feel provisional, searching. Howe once described herself as “a woman of the road,” and that itinerancy persists. Even at the end, she is setting out again, cutting ropes.

What remains most striking is her fidelity to uncertainty. She never resolved the tension between belief and doubt, between action and contemplation. Instead, she inhabited it — what she once called a “liminal disquiet.” That trembling threshold is the true subject of this book.

In the final reckoning, This Poor Book does not console. It accompanies. It stands beside suffering without turning away, and beside holiness without romanticising it. The poems burn quietly, like embers that refuse spectacle. They ask what language can carry when nearly everything has been stripped away.

Time, she reminds us, is intimate. Then it is finished.

The poems remain — poor, luminous, unguarded — enacting, even now, that movement toward pity which she has named as love.

Misha Honcharenko is a Ukrainian writer based in West Yorkshire. He is the author of the poetry collection Skin of Nocturnal Apple (Pilot Press, 2023) and the novel Trap Unfolds Me Greedily (Sissy Anarchy, 2024). Writing across poetry and fiction, his work explores memory, embodiment, and queer estrangement, and has appeared in publications including Vogue Ukraine, Erotic Review, and Worms.