Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I'll never know . . . But now that I have a name, I know I must write . . . I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad.
Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century.
Illustrated by Colleen McCallion
978-1-0684395-1-3
20 b&w illustrations
13.9 × 21.6 cm
116 pp paperback
1 December 2025
Fiction
Poetry
£ 11.99
A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life.
At once evocative and subtly incisive, Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time.
About the author
Fanny Howe was born on 15 October 1940 in Buffalo, New York. She is the author of more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and taught literature and writing throughout her life, mentoring a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical thinking. She was professor emerita in literature at the University of California, San Diego, until her death on 8 July 2025 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Endorsements
A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life.
At once evocative and subtly incisive, Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time.
Fanny Howe is a hallowed voice of the violent and brutal twentieth century. A sacred idiot, a wise friend who passes a bottle of warmth through the icy night, who fishes for what haunts the depths.
Fanny Howe is the closest thing we have to a sage to guide us through turbulent times, a poet who reminds us that the personal is political and that the political is about people. Her craft, wisdom and force of will are models for how to live, and how to write.
Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty.
Poet of unsettled dreams.
Reading her fiction feels something like facing a patch of wilderness—startling, beautiful, yet terrifyingly mysterious.
Press
- Cleveland Review of Books Soul Fresh and Soul Clean: On Fanny Howe’s “Holy Smoke”
- To Be Magazine Keeping the Soul Fresh: Fanny Howe's Holy Smoke
- The TLS Twenty Questions with Fanny Howe
- Pacifica Radio Archives Poetry: Fanny Howe reads from her novel "Holy Smoke", just out from Fiction Collective
This Poor Book
London-rose | Beauty Will Save the World
Night Philosophy
In Thrall
Flood Tide
A Toast to St Martirià
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities
Bourgeois Coldness
Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent
Tosquelles: Healing Institutions
Twenty Shadows
Wave of Blood
I have brought you a severed hand
Darryl
Artificial Gut Feeling
Disorganisation & Sex
Bosses
Stage of Recovery
Journey to the East of France
What the Fire Sees—A Divided Reader
Let Them Rot
World of Interiors
Another Sun
How to Leave the World
Again! Plenitude and Repetition
Self-portrait