Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store and Woodberry Poetry Room welcome Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout and National Book Award finalist Fanny Howe for a discussion of their latest poetry collections, Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015 and The Needle’s Eye: Passing through Youth. They will be joined in conversation by poet STEPH BURT, Professor of English at Harvard University.

About Partly:

Rae Armantrout’s poetry comprises one of the most refined and visionary bodies of work written over the last forty years. These potent, compact meditations on our complicated times reveal her observant sensibility, lively intellect, and emotional complexity. This generous volume charts the evolution of Armantrout’s mature, stylistically distinct work. In addition to 25 new poems, there are selections from her books Up To Speed, Next Life, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning volume Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, and Itself. Including some of her most brilliant pieces, Partly affirms Armantrout’s reputation as one of our sharpest and most innovative writers.

“These potent, compact meditations on our complicated times reveal Armantrout’s observant sensibility, lively intellect, and emotional complexity. Including some of her most brilliant pieces, this generous volume affirms Armantrout’s reputation as one of our sharpest and most innovative writers.” —Publishers Weekly

About The Needle’s Eye:

Fanny Howe’s The Needle’s Eye: Passing through Youth is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual logic. The book contains filmic images that subvert the usual narrative chronology; it is focused on the theme of youth, doomed or saved. A fourteenth-century folktale of two boys who set out to find happiness, the story of Francis and Clare with their revolutionary visions, the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston, the poet George Oppen and the philosopher Simone Weil, two strangers who loved but remain strange, and the wild-child Brigid of Ireland: all these emerge “from multiple directions, but always finally from the eye at the end.” As the philosopher Richard Kearney writes, “Howe’s ruminations and aesthetics are those of the fragmentary, but are unified by world thinkers like Arendt, Weil, Agamben, and Yeats.” The Needle’s Eye is a brilliant and deeply felt exploration of faith and terror, coincidence and perception, by a literary artist of profound moral intelligence, “recognized as one of the country’s least compromising yet most readable experimentalist writers” (The Boston Globe).