Penitential Cries

by Susan Howe

A stirring, lyric new collection by Susan Howe, one of America’s foremost poets


What labor to live forever. Speak of the elect what can you do in all this world so much life in the little of it. 


In four parts, Susan Howe’s new book opens with the arresting long prose poem “Penitential Cries,” followed by a group of word-collages “Sterling Park in the Dark,” “The Deserted Shelf,” and finally a brief sparrow poem. Speaking of her new work written in “the evening of life,” Howe quotes Thomas  My galley, chargèd with forgetfulness, / thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass. She “I love those two lines. Between trespass and penitence. In the wilderness of the Book Stack Tower inquiry is trespass. Now at eighty-seven,” the poet adds, regarding Penitential Cries, “I want to express my pilgrim's progress between rocks and paper places. The clock is ticking. It's getting late. Supper is on the table. Our father lies full fifty fathoms five. A storm is coming.”

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published September 16, 2025

About the author

Susan Howe was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Her most recent poetry collections are The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularities (1990).

Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (1985).

Her work also has appeared in Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson (Oxford University Press, 1999); The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003); and Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2, edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rotherberg (1998).

She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 1996 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in the winter of 1998 she was a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities.

Reviews

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

without hesitation one of the greatest collections of poetry i’ve ever read

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most exciting poets of our time, maybe my favourite living poet. The word collages are like a new direction in the topology of semantic chains of meaning (here we have Donne, Goethe, and Howe literally interwoven). Something pretty fascinating too about avant garde poets (thinking of Anne Carson here as well) getting more explicitly experimental the older they get — Howe’s form, Ashbery’s looseness on works like Breezeway — something about “late style”

[Gijs Koorevaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly inaccesible, but interesting nonetheless. I get the sense that this is part of the the capstone on a life of reading and writing that I am unfamiliar with. She has my attention, I will be reading more of her earlier work for sure

[Matthieu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Susan more or less mailing it in at this point.

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a breathtaking, shattering work. I’ve been reading Howe for almost two decades, and this one is special. Written at the end of her life - even if she publishes another book, it will be hard to top its culminating power. Howe’s work has always been spectral, ghostly, already gone - but reading this one, I felt death close by- and like Howe, yearned for the library’s bottomless refusal of the unavoidable approaching extinction.

[Lucia Pirone]

susan is washed.

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

there is something infinitely moving about howe's art of accumulation in its relation to aging. all of it fits on the page. knowledge has sifted through the open hand. words don't accumulate the way we think they do. superimposition drops the letters. "the way a particular grain of paper speaks without our knowing to a leader in another sect scattering stars across a field running parallel with eternity the truth of quietness before birth of the world we need to run across to ask if nomen has other omens when each lost letter speaks for itself"

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intimations of mortality in the three “word-based” poems and her visual cut-and-paste work in the other. Sturdy but maybe not superb. Some fine lines and images scattered throughout, and the terse, oblique poem for Fanny (her sister) seems to have been written before Fanny’s death this year.

[andré crombie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dove for the Shaping spirit of Imagination beats her wings against two thousand tons of steel and iron built on early twentieth century skyscraper principles to hold sixteen miles of aisles with carrell partitions at windows.

[luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Howe's cut-up poetry remains a challenging 'reading' experience, but her prose and verse poems here cut straight through me.