A meditation on time, violence, and chance by "one of America's most
dazzling poets" (O, The Oprah Magazine)
Fanny Howe's The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth is a sequence of
essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual
logic. The book contains filmic images that subvert the usual narrative
chronology; it is focused on the theme of youth, doomed or saved. A
fourteenth-century folktale of two boys who set out to find happiness,
the story of Francis and Clare with their revolutionary visions, the
Tsarnaev brothers of Boston, the poet George Oppen and the philosopher
Simone Weil, two strangers who loved but remain strange, and the
wild-child Brigid of Ireland: all these emerge "from multiple
directions, but always finally from the eye at the end." As the
philosopher Richard Kearney writes, "Howe's ruminations and aesthetics
are those of the fragmentary, but are unified by world thinkers like
Arendt, Weil, Agamben, and Yeats." The Needle's Eye is a brilliant and
deeply felt exploration of faith and terror, coincidence and perception,
by a literary artist of profound moral intelligence, "recognized as one
of the country's least compromising yet most readable experimentalist
writers" (The Boston Globe).
