![]() ![]() ![]() The result is a characteristically strange and unsettling volume. Howe is fond of arranging her collections in sonata-like contrasting movements, and here she adopts a tripartite structure, moving from diary-like prose in the first section to historical collage (assisted by scissors, Scotch tape and a photocopier) and short untitled lyrics. While this intimate sadness is omnipresent in the book, it finds expression in both obvious and oblique forms. The occasion for such an ascetic prescription is grief: Howe’s last book, The Midnight, elegized her mother, Mary Manning, and That This also has a death at its centre, that of her husband Peter Hare. In “Disappearance Approach”, the essay that forms the first part of her new collection, That This, Susan Howe sets herself the challenge of “Starting from nothing with nothing when everything else has been said”. ![]()
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