In this slender volume, Howe’s poems are as spare in their words as they are pointed and direct in their language; with conviction they face death and violence; they mark time; they conjure memories; they question high moral ground; they ponder motherhood; they contemplate our origins and our future.

In “Hurry,” Howe’s daughter is asked to speed up, a universal request from every parent to their young child; but in the lingering moment during which the poet takes the time to observe her daughter wearing the quintessential childhood costume of disheveled attire she realizes, at last, that hurrying is the opposite of what she truly wants or for what she knows to be important to her life. This dichotomy— and awareness of that dilemma — appears in other poems as well, such as in “Prayer” (p. 27), where the poet opens and closes with what should have happened, but has not yet done so because of the distractions of life that fill the space in between.

References to children abound in these poems, giving a powerful focus and structure for Howe’s moral concerns. Some poems begin innocently enough but quickly turn into terrifying scenarios, like the child’s questioning game of “Would you Rather” which begins:

And ends in a choice that no one can make:

In “The Tree Fort” (p. 26), the poet writes with memory of her own childhood, where a beloved structure on a neighbor’s land was torn down (“It stood beyond our boundaries / but we didn’t know that until the lot was sold”); here, child confronts child, with the implied threat of violence, but in the end it wasn’t the material that ultimately mattered but instead it was the emotional result: “And Gloria / became our neighbor, if not our friend.”

In this slender volume, Howe’s poems are as spare in their words as they are pointed and direct in their language; with conviction they face death and violence; they mark time; they conjure memories; they question high moral ground; they ponder motherhood; they contemplate our origins and our future. Marie Howe clearly wonders about her place on this earth, her relevance, her relationship with others she knows, and with those for whom she’ll never have contact. While she is neither prolific in her production nor loud in her presence, her poems are powerful reminders of what a poet, and ourselves, can offer to humanity, and why we should do it.