SOURCE: Selinger, Eric Murphy. “My Susan Howe.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 20, nos. 1-2 (1995): 359-85.

In the following review, Selinger traces Howe's literary development in her prose and poetry and finds The Nonconformist's Memorial to be one of her most compelling and accessible poetry collections.

You can still buy the Peter Pauper Press edition of Emily Dickinson's Love Poems, a slim white book that haunts the upper floors of chain-store poetry sections, poised to foist on unsuspecting shoppers its paltry versions of the life and work. Never mind that Dickinson declined her one known suitor, the deliciously titled Judge Lord; set hastily aside the lifelong correspondence with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, at a word from whom this self-proclaimed “Idolater” would “forfeit righteousness.” Above all, forget the language of the poems: taut, demanding, and mercurial. We “know for a fact,” the introduction to Love Poems insists, that after years of romantic...