Memory and Heaven

Christopher Howell

Christopher Howell is author of six collections of poems, most recently Memory and Heaven, and has received grant awards from the National Endowment, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. His poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in many journals, including Hudson Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Gettysburg Review. He is principal literary editor for Lynx House Press and coordinator/editor for the Bluestem Award Competition.

Reviews

The poems in Memory and Heaven reflect Howell's arrival as a mature poet, often elegiac, sometimes wry, even surreal, and always contemplative. From the wit of "The Christian Science Minotaur" to poems about Weldon Kees, Kipling, and Ponce de Leon, Howell keeps a level lyrical course that engages . . .

—Maxine Kumin

There is an ease about [Christopher] Howell's ability to slip out into the amazing and return to the reader, smoking. . . . It is as if the poem were the iridescent overflow of a profoundly abundant imagination.

—Tim Barnes

I wish I could describe this new book of Christopher Howell's. But . . . these poems are always topsyturvying our expectations . . . with every turn of the page—and yet are connected, too: by deep thought worn lightly, and by large vision writ in small details.

—Albert Goldbarth

These strong, courtly poems refuse to bow to any authority other than their own truth. And for this reason—and a dozen others—they bring great pleasure. Christopher Howell is a poet to be taken seriously, and then savored.

—James Tate

Tangled, fertile, obsessed with time, elegiac, comic, shifty, and always sharply, freshly observant, each syllable carries on a running battle with those who would reduce life to mock-turtle simulations and virtual realities, and each word is stroked on the loom of gratitude for the power of the imagination we are given.

—Bill Tremblay

Memory and Heaven is the strongest book yet by an already strong poet.

—Jonathan Holden

Ordering Information

To purchase Memory and Heaven by Christopher Howell, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.