That This (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780811219181)

"What treasures of knowledge we cluster around." That This is a collection in three pieces. "Disappearance Approach," an essay about Howe's husband's sudden death--"land of darkness or darkness itself you shadow mouth"--begins the book with paintings by Poussin, an autopsy, Sarah Edwards and her sister-in-law Hannah, phantoms, and elusive remnants. "Frolic Architecture," the second section--inspired by visits to the vast 18th-century Jonathan Edwards archives at the Beinecke and accompanied by six photograms by James Welling--presents hauntingly lovely, oblique type-collages of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary entries that Howe (with scissors, "invisible" Scotch Tape, and a Canon copier) has twisted, flattened, and snipped into inscapes of force. The final section, "That This," delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal, with their orderly appearance packing startling power:

That this book is a history of
a shadow that is a shadow of


Me mystically one in another
another another to subserve.

Author: Susan Howe
ISBN-10: 0811219186
ISBN-13: 9780811219181
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 02/07/2011
Pages: 112
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.36lbs
Size: 8.75h x 7.57w x 0.31d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/17/2011
Library Journal 02/01/2011 pg. 67