SOURCE: A review of Pierce-Arrow, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 246, April 26, 1999, p. 76.

In the following review, the critic provides a positive assessment of Pierce-Arrow.

With her first book of new poems in six years, Howe further solidifies her reputation as one of North America's foremost experimental writers. Pierce-Arrow engages many of the elements and themes that have consistently appeared in both her poetry (The Europe of Trusts, etc.) and prose (My Emily Dickinson and The Birth-mark). Here, as in previous work, the manuscripts and marginalia of marginal and anti-institutional authors (with an emphasis on women writers) are seamlessly brought together with historiography and lyric—and the results continue to be arresting. The focal points of this book are the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and his wife Juliette, whose full birth name and ancestry remain to this day somewhat of a mystery. For Howe, this mystery becomes a subtle...