The Quarry

Reviews / Votes

"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