Eros, Affliction and Joy

  • Admission Free
  • Sponsored by Christ College

 

marie howe - brochureMarie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry: The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2009); What the Living Do (1997); and The Good Thief (1988). She is also the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others.

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; of the collection playwright Eve Ensler said, “These poems made me gasp. Each one a revelation, a lifeline, a domestic galaxy. This is the poetry of our times, a guide to living on the brink of the mystical and the mundane.” What the Living Do addresses the grief of losing a loved one and is a transparent, accessible documentary of loss. Publishers Weekly named the book one of the five best poetry collections of 1997, saying “The tentative transformation of agonizing, slow-motion loss into redemption is Howe’s signal achievement in this wrenching second collection.” In large part an elegy to her brother who died from AIDS, her intimacy and bravery in laying bare the music of her own pain—but never the pain alone—is part of its resonance. Inside each poem there is also a joy, a new breath of life, some kind of redemption.
Co-sponsored by Valparaiso University’s Wordfest, with generous support from the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts and the Valparaiso University Cultural Arts Committee.