Selected Works by Marie Howe: The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry
- Meri Utkovska
- May 12
- 9 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Born in 1950 in Rochester, New York, Marie Howe attended the socially progressive, parochial all-girls Sacred Heart Convent School and the University of Windsor. She earned her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she studied with poet Stanley Kunitz, whom she refers to as “my true teacher.”
Howe's first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, stating that she writes “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.” It is a collection of "oracular yet self-doubting speakers," who "often voice their concerns through Biblical and mythical allusions". (Poetry)
When Kunitz chose the book for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets in 1988, he observed, “Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.”
Academy of American Poets Chancellor Arthur Sze said:
Marie Howe’s poems are remarkable for their focused, intense, and haunting lyricism. Her poems characteristically unfold through a series of luminous particulars that gather emotional power as they delve into the complexities of the human heart. Her poems are acclaimed for writing through loss with verve, but they also find the miraculous in the ordinary and transform quotidian incidents into enduring revelation.
A year later, in 1989, Howe's brother John died of an AIDS-related illness. Speaking in an AGNI interview, she stated “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic completely.” An elegy to John, her second collection of poetry What the Living Do (1997), was praised as one of the five best poetry collections of the year by Publishers Weekly. The collection is a raw, laid-bare-of-metaphor, documentation of loss and everything stemming from it.
Speaking about poetry and everyday life, Howe notes:
This might be the most difficult task for us in postmodern life: not to look away from what is actually happening. To put down the iPod and the email and the phone. To look long enough so that we can look through it—like a window.
In her third collection, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), Howe changed her focus from the personal narrative to, what she describes in an AGNI interview as the “obsess[ion] with the metaphysical, the spiritual dimensions of life as they present themselves in this world.” In Publishers Weekly, Brenda Shaughnessy observes that these are poems in which Howe “makes metaphor matter and material metaphysical.”
Howe published her fourth book of poetry Magdalene in 2017. In 2024, New and Selected Poems appeared, for which she was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and NYU, and co-edited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Academy of American Poets.
She was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014. She lives in New York City.
Celebrating her Pulitzer Prize Win for Poetry, I selected her poems "The Copper Beech," "Bad Weather," "The Gate," and "One Day" along with an overview of all her published collections, a reading, and an interview, as rest-stops on the journey into her masterly poetic world.
The Copper Beech
Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,
with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where
I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.
One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell
darkening the sidewalk.
Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,
I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,
watching it happen without it happening to me.
Copyright Credit: Reprinted from What the Living Do, W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. Copyright © by Marie Howe.
Source: What the Living Do (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997)
Bad Weather
What does it matter that this cold June breaks, another dish
on the kitchen floor, skittering under the table legs.
So it requires the long strawed broom, the extra stoop.
It will have out. When the sun comes back. When the rain stops.
But something doesn't fit. Something isn't fitting.
The washing machine jams and hums too loudly. The chickadees
fall from the trees. A swallow is caught in the chimney.
The smallest ram lamb isn't eating. The days pass.
June is too cold. The spiders threaten to overrun the nest
lodged in the rafters. They can't be eaten fast enough.
The mother, beside herself, has seen this happen only once before,
the eggs draped with gauze.
No letters come. The small tin flag is down. The house creeps
farther from the road. The grass rises in the rain. The scythes
rust and will not cut. The blades squeak and sigh, nothing
to be done. We close the porch doors, but every night
they open just a little. We hear it from the bedroom,
a small creak. no one there. The cold lies down in the meadow
where the sheep are credulous and sturdy and dumb, but
the ram lamb will not eat. His mother has already forgotten him.
The windows will not stay shut. Even the small nails
we bang in are loose in the morning, and the screens flap
a little in the small cold wind. From under the covers,
I watch you move around the house, fixing the broken things:
the desk lamp, the toaster, the radio that still will not speak.
The red hens haven't laid in a week. There's nothing we can do.
Nothing. It could be ten years ago. I could be dreaming.
This could be last winter all over again
with the wood stacked and the snow rushing from miles away.
Then too, the trees leaned a little funny and the cat
disappeared for days. Nothing would make him come back.
Copyright Credit: Marie Howe, "Bad Weather" from The Good Thief. Copyright © 1988 by Marie Howe.
The Gate
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother's body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?
And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?
And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.
Copyright Credit: Marie Howe, "The Gate" from What the Living Do. Copyright © 1997 by Marie Howe.
Source: What the Living Do (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997)
One Day
One day the patterned carpet, the folding chairs,
the woman in the blue suit by the door examining her split ends,
all of it will go on without me. I’ll have disappeared,
as easily as a coin under lake water, and few to notice the difference
—a coin dropping into the darkening—
and West 4th Street, the sesame noodles that taste like too much peanut butter
lowered into the small white paper carton—all of it will go on and on—
and the I that caused me so much trouble? Nowhere
or grit thrown into the garden
or into the sticky bodies of several worms,
or just gone, stopped—like the Middle Ages,
like the coin Whitman carried in his pocket all the way to that basement
bar on Broadway that isn’t there anymore.
Oh to be in Whitman’s pocket, on a cold winter day,
to feel his large warm hand slide in and out, and in again.
To be taken hold of by Walt Whitman! To be exchanged!
To be spent for something somebody wanted and drank and found delicious.
Copyright © 2017 by Marie Howe. From Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017).
More like this:
Marie Howe: Essential Books
New and Selected Poems (hardback)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org
Characterized by "a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions" (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe's poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of Howe's four previous collections--including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award-longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood--and contains twenty new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about ageing while walking the dog, Howe is "a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy" (Dorianne Laux).
Product Details
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: April 02, 2024
Pages: 192
Language: English
TypeBook: Hardback
EAN/UPC: 9781324075035
Dimensions: 9.1 X 6.2 X 0.9 inches | 0.9 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry
Magdalene (paperback)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org
Magdalene imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape--hailing a cab, raising a child, and listening to the news on the radio. Between facing the traumas of her past and navigating daily life, the narrator of Magdalene yearns for the guidance of her spiritual teacher, a Christ figure, whose death she continues to grieve. Erotic, spirited, and searching for meaning, she is a woman striving to be the subject of her own life, fully human and alive to the sacred in the mortal world.
Product Details
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: August 28, 2018
Pages: 96
Language: English
TypeBook: Paperback / Softback
EAN/UPC: 9780393356038
Dimensions: 8.2 X 6.0 X 0.2 inches | 0.3 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (paperback)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org
Hurrying through errands, attending to a dying mother, and helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time--during those apparently unmiraculous periods of everyday trouble and joy?
Product Details
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: September 01, 2009
Pages: 80
Language: English
TypeBook: Paperback / Softback
EAN/UPC: 9780393337341
Dimensions: 8.2 X 6.1 X 0.2 inches | 0.3 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry
What the Living Do (paperback)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org
Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, and stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form . . . a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation (Boston Globe).
Product Details
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: April 17, 1999
Pages: 96
Language: English
TypeBook: Paperback / Softback
EAN/UPC: 9780393318869
Dimensions: 8.1 X 5.4 X 0.3 inches | 0.3 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry
The Good Thief
(paperback)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org
The heralded debut collection of poems by the author of What the Living Do (Norton, 1997). Selected by Margaret Atwood as a winner in the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series, this unique collection was the first sounding of a deeply authentic voice. Howe's early writings concern relationship, attachment, and loss, in a highly original search for personal transcendence. Many of the thirty-four poems in The Good Thief appeared in such prestigious journals and periodicals as The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Agni Review, and The Partisan Review.
Product Details
Publisher: Persea Books
Publish Date: January 17, 1988
Pages: 54
Language: English
TypeBook: Paperback / Softback
EAN/UPC: 9780892551279
Dimensions: 8.7 X 5.2 X 0.2 inches | 0.2 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry
References:
Poetry Foundation, Marie Howe
The Academy of American Poets, Marie Howe,
The Pulitzer Prizes, 2025
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