What the Living Do

Poems

Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive.

What the Living Do reflects “a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe’s writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form…a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation” (Boston Globe).

This audio edition of What the Living Do is beautifully read by the author. Produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Cover photograph: Song of Sentient Beings (1134) by Bill Jacobson (1994), used with permission. ©1998 Marie Howe §

©1998 Marie Howe (P)2024 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

Review of “What the Living Do”

Great story — great performance — I attended a MasterClass session with Marie Howe and Billy Collins. I was already aware of Mr. Collins but that was my first exposure to Ms. Howe. I was very impressed, and that’s why I purchased this audiobook.

And Howe is a wonderful story teller as well as poet...

The elegant simplicity of Howe's poems that weave together the pain and the support and love of family.

Masterful

Marie Howe transforms the quotidian into the holy. Personal narrative is resurrected here into vignettes of living memory, and the ghosts we live with everyday listen with rapt attention.