New and Selected Poems
by Marie Howe
Summary
New and Selected Poems draws on four decades of Marie Howe's work, gathering material from her four previous collections, The Good Thief, What the Living Do, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, and Magdalene, alongside new poems written since, into a single volume that lets a reader trace her lifelong commitment to plain, direct language across an entire career. The book's center of gravity remains What the Living Do, published in 1997 after the death of Howe's brother John from AIDS in 1989, a loss she has said changed her aesthetic completely, pushing her toward the stripped down, emotionally direct style the rest of her work has continued to develop.
Across the four collections gathered here, Howe returns again and again to mortality, grief, and how the sacred surfaces inside the most ordinary domestic moments, a cup of coffee, a walk, an argument, rather than in any obviously elevated or ceremonial setting. Read together rather than as separate books, the poems show a single sensibility working the same handful of questions from different angles over roughly thirty years, the new poems extending rather than departing from the concerns the earliest collections already established.
Reading New and Selected Poems means encountering a compressed, plainspoken lyric voice built to locate the transcendent inside daily life rather than apart from it. It suits a reader who wants an introduction to an entire career at once, or a longtime reader of Howe's individual books who wants to see how directly the early grief of What the Living Do continued to shape everything she wrote after it.
Historical Context & Significance
New and Selected Poems won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; that year's finalists were Jennifer Chang's An Authentic Life and Danez Smith's Bluff: Poems. The volume also appeared in the United Kingdom under the title What the Earth Seemed to Say, published by Bloodaxe Books.
Howe was born in Rochester, New York, in 1950 into a large Irish Catholic family, and earned her MFA at Columbia University, where she studied under Stanley Kunitz. She served as New York State Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2018, and currently serves as poet in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, honors that arrived across the same decades this retrospective volume now gathers into one book.