Howe is a genre chemist, mixing disparate textual, visual, and auditory techniques to create singular narrative energy ... Among other things, Savage Conversations is an interrogation of the depth and rot of American racism ... One of the startling undertakings of Savage Conversations is realizing the darkness of Todd Lincoln’s mind and still finding a way to care and worry for her ... But Savage Conversations operates without sentimental nostalgia; it fixes its gaze on the horror that is omnipresent in American history, even by our favorite figures ... Savage Conversations operates with a savage intimacy that goes beneath the skin, that creeps and bleeds and transubstantiates back into something that haunts us, that reminds us in a Faulknerian sense that the past isn’t dead; it not even past.
...a sui generis collection of poetry and drama ... Savage Conversations is a well-researched yet intuitive depiction of a history that’s too often omitted from textbooks and cultural memory. Conceived as a lyrical theater of the absurd, and written in the form of a play, Howe’s book puts the grotesque spectacle of American history in the spotlight ... Howe’s lyric fragments and rhythm (re)tells a story that’s often shunted through the linear, patriarchal lens of history ... Lyric fragments run together like history, while moments of human hurt are punctuated as sharp reminders of the brutality of execution instead of emancipation ... The absurdist reality that Howe envisions offers a more accurate history of the United States and a more honest assessment of President Lincoln’s legacy than most textbooks do ... Savage Conversations posits an America whose collective insanity allows for the eradication of communities, the rewriting of shameful narratives, and the heroizing of villains.
The story is a reckoning of hauntings and unprosecuted crimes, an attempt at imagining some way to live with an unbearable history of human rights abuses and genocide. Among the many rhetorical and craft techniques worthy of praise in Howe’s writing is her insightful and deft use of dramatic monologues ... Howe challenges narratives of innocence surrounding white female fragility and instead considers the agency of a First Lady ... A particularly powerful element in this collection is the character of the noose, who hangs at the periphery of these conversations, commenting in brief but disturbing reminders of the terrible history unfolding around the purgatory where Mary Todd Lincoln and Savage Indian find themselves ... The footnotes are formal innovations that enrich and provide powerful historical context to the body of the poems. Other formal innovations, that are equally effective and affecting, include descriptions of images one might find in a museum ... Howe’s readers receive a symbolic testament to the limitations of what so many Americans are willing to see and know.
The characters’ speech reads like poetry—imagistic, rhythmic, and compressed. Some of the language comes directly from Dakota songs. As the story unspools, Lincoln’s character becomes increasingly suspect and even more fascinating. Did she suffer from Munchausen by proxy? Did she kill her children? Was Robert Todd Lincoln right to have her institutionalized? Were elements of her character suppressed to keep her husband’s legacy intact? Intriguing, poetic, and disturbing, this play opens up a whole new biographical interpretation for Mary Todd Lincoln.
..superb ... This lucid collection ingeniously examines the deep and sordid layers of complicity ... The exchanges between Todd Lincoln and Savage Indian consist of a masterful quid pro quo.
... fills the wide-open gaps with a narrative of 'what could have been,' makes the absences present in very intimate ways ... The atmosphere [Howe] creates makes the trajectories tangible. There is tension ... What he does reads like America. It’s very complex and very American and out of the many entangled complexities I am curious about the connection between revenge and pleasure, being revenged and being pleasured by that revenge ... The revenge in LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations may be situated in the realm of rewriting history. Literature ... Whatever it is, it’s very effective. The images stick. The questions linger.
... illuminating and challenging ... Although revisionist in scope, Howe’s drama taps emotional undercurrents that course imperceptibly through conventional historical narratives ... Readers will be intrigued by the light this work shines on incidents behind the scenes of history.
... illuminating and challenging ... Although revisionist in scope, Howe’s drama taps emotional undercurrents that course imperceptibly through conventional historical narratives ... Readers will be intrigued by the light this work shines on incidents behind the scenes of history.
