The Quarry: Essays

A powerful selection of Susan Howe's previously uncollected essays, The Quarry moves backward chronologically, from her brand-new "Vagrancy in the Park" (about Wallace Stevens) through such essential texts as "The Disappearance Approach," "Personal Narrative," "Sorting Facts," "Frame Structures," and "Where Should the Commander Be," and ending with her seminal early criticism, "The End of Art." The essays ofThe Quarrymap the intellectual territory of one of America's most important and vital avant-garde poets.

About the Author :
Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and two of literary criticism, Susan Howe's recent collection of poems That This, published by New Directions won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Three CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, Thiefth, Souls of the Labadie Tract, and Frolic Architecture were released on the Blue Chopsticks label (2005; 2011). Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and served as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets between 2000-2006. In fall, 2009 she was awarded a Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin. Grenfell Press published a fine press edition of "Frolic Architecture with photographic prints by James Welling in 2009. Recently she was an Artist In Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In October, 2013 her word collages were exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the Whitney Biennial Spring, 2014. A limited press edition of Tom Tit Tot (the word collages which amount to a series poem) with art work by R.H. Quaytman has just been published by MoMA in New York, and Spontaneous Particulars:The Telepathy of Archives, (2014) published by Christine Burgin and New Directions.

Review :
"Reaching back through Hawthorne, Dickinson and beyond, Susan Howe taps a stream of American thinking that is as as clear and fresh as a draught of well water. She is our conscience, our voice, our song." -- John Ashbery "No other poet now writing has Howe's power to bring together narrative and lyric, scholarship and historical speculation, found text and pure invention." -- Marjorie Perloff "Universally recognized as a major poet, Susan Howe should also be known as the most innovative, the most thrilling essayist writing today." -- Eliot Weinberger "Marvelous with a visionary apprehension of what is to come, telepathic communication with past poetries, histories, lives, material and spiritual realities." -- Jonathan Creasey - The Los Angeles Review of Books "Howe's brilliant, idiosyncratic essay is-like much of her work-a combination of fierce rigor and deep generosity. Howe unlocks." -- Ben Lerner "She manages to balance the most cerebral passages with a sharp eye for just the right detail...Howe is not for casual readers, but serious ones will be amply rewarded." -- Publishers Weekly "For fans of Howe's poetry and readers fascinated by artistic process." -- Kirkus Reviews "Howe's words give the impression of echoing another, hidden poetry of which we catch only fragments, like an opera sung in another room-except that the other room is death, or history, or the ineffable." -- Geoffrey O'Brien - The Village Voice "The end result is something of a photographic negative: history refreshed and personalized by virtue of its own estrangement." -- Dustin Illingworth - 3:AM "Monomania has its rewards-an incantatory power that shines through. Howe's images, being historical as well as biographical, have the eerie shading of ghosts half-believed in, giving a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest." -- Kirkus Reviews "An important voice in contemporary literature, a signal inheritor of an American poetic tradition. Like Dickinson, her Massachusetts muse, Howe turns the English of a self steeped in books such that every word, as in Scripture, glows with an almost moral quality." -- Artforum "As a poet and a critic she articulates precisely those soundings of uncertainty, those zones of failed or impaired utterance that constitute the literary history of America's uneasy commerce with the word." -- Richard Sieburth - The Times Literary Supplement "Susan Howe is a kind of poststructuralist visionary." -- Bruce Campbell "One of America's foremost poets." -- Publishers Weekly