The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? “Let the best one win.” War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It’s so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted. Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.
978-1-7398431-1-3
1 b&w illustration
13.9 × 21.6 cm
104 pp paperback
26 April 2022
Fiction
Poetry
£ 11.99
It feels we aren’t reading prose but language that oscillates between liturgy and prayer.
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.
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.
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
It feels we aren’t reading prose but language that oscillates between liturgy and prayer.
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.
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 simply one of the best and most innovative writers alive.
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.
Press
- no no no (No More Poetry) Fanny Howe, London-rose | Beauty Will Save the World
- Cleveland Review of Books Out of the Seeming Blue: On Fanny Howe’s “London-rose”
- DC's 5 books I read recently & loved: Fanny Howe London-Rose | Beauty Will Save the World
- The Baffler The Irreconcilable Fanny Howe
- Bookforum A Story of Supernatural Kindness
Night Philosophy
This Poor Book
Holy Smoke
Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent
Bourgeois Coldness
Darryl
I have brought you a severed hand
In Thrall
Tosquelles: Healing Institutions
Twenty Shadows
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities
A Toast to St Martirià
Flood Tide
Wave of Blood
Let Them Rot
Stage of Recovery
What the Fire Sees—A Divided Reader
Bosses
Journey to the East of France
Another Sun
Self-portrait
Artificial Gut Feeling
Again! Plenitude and Repetition
How to Leave the World
World of Interiors
Disorganisation & Sex