Poetry
80 Pages
ISBN: 1-59766-022-1
Paper: $14.95

Emma Howell began writing at an early age and published her first poems at fifteen. She took writing workshops at Portland State University and was a creative writing major at Oberlin College, where she also studied literature, languages, folklore, and African dance. She spent a year studying in Spain and six months in Brazil, where she died at the age of twenty. This book is her first collection.

Sometimes, while in the presence of a great talent and youthful passion, we glimpse a maturity that resides in its own singular moment. For me, this revelation arises out of reading Emma Howell’s Slim Night of Recognition, a marvelous collection of poems that the heart can trust. Here’s a book destined to live, to tug its readers back to its pages again and again. Slim Night of Recognition is a momentous treatise of emotions and feelings.

—Yusef Komunyakaa

“These poems possess an uncanny authority. They swerve in clean and unsettling ways, and hit distinct,  wonderfully unpredictable and always right-feeling notes. They're truly stirring. There seems a haunting presience in many of them, so quietly there. Astonishing to think she wrote them at so young an age, given their tender authority and patient, graceful movement. Still they feel more than promising, though they are that-- they feel fulfilled. It is a real beauty of a book."

—Laurie Sheck

In Slim Night of Recognition, Emma Howell’s surprisingly mature vision is always deep and often dark: “All I know I have said into an emptiness / to test the depth of it,” she wrote, even as she reached for transcendence. The poems approach the nearly unsayable through unexpected juxtapositions of imagery and sure but unpredictable music; ultimately, their business is to engage in the “trade between / oceans and constellations, between / seeds and stars, between / the borders of countries / and the mouths of hymns.” This is work that blessedly transcends the borders of Emma Howell’s all-too-short life.

—Martha Collins