RaveThe New York TimesThis is not a story of mere neglect but of a writer’s collusion with invisibility, with a lifelong ambivalence toward selfhood and its burdens ... The onus of personality, the weight of the past, crop up often in Howland’s work ... As that first paragraph portended, this is a story about her neighbor’s heart, not her own — an anthology of the lives she encounters in the ward known as W-3 ... here’s a refusal to romanticize sickness or health. Her suffering doesn’t make her unique or interesting; instead it folds her into a common experience. Her insistence is on telling the story of a collective with blunt clarity, and sidestepping the genre’s potential for sentimentality or sensationalism. She brings the particularities of the world to life, how hair care was a miserable problem for the women of the ward; everyone just gave up and resorted to wearing towels like turbans ... It’s what hooked me — the temperature of the prose, its cool watchfulness. The narration isn’t distant, but it isn’t intimate either. Howland isn’t interested in redemption or instruction — but something more elusive ... It’s that quality of depiction that Howland seems to pursue — the clarity that allows readers to feel as if we are encountering the ward itself, Zelma herself, and not the narrator’s projections, not her own need.
Kevin Young
RaveNew York Times... a monumental tribute to that persistence, from the colonial period to the present. It features poems on injustice, harassment, hunger — protests on the page — but also rapturous odes to music and food, to gawking at beautiful strangers, to boredom and birth pains and menopause, and, yes, to moon, elms and lilacs, too ... the book feels like a powerful volume of American history, in which poets beginning with Phyllis Wheatley, the country’s first published Black poet, comment on their times ... If this anthology reads like a form of history, it is also a history of form. It traces the tributaries of English and folk traditions, the rhythms of jazz and the Beats, the influence of modernism and the Black Arts Movement. Whatever the style, whatever the shape of the vessel, the particular holding power of the poem is clear ... Always: the poem behind the poem, the stakes in the smallest things. It is overwhelming to contemplate the variety and history contained in this volume. The poems gathered here have the force of event. They were written as acts of public mourning, and as secrets; they are love poems and bitter quarrels. They are prized company.
