Julie Ehlers's Reviews > What the Living Do: Poems

For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.

How do I talk about this? As we all know, the reading experiences that have had the biggest impact on us can be the most difficult to write about. Marie Howe’s second collection is often exceedingly dark, dealing as it does with her turbulent, often violent childhood, a wrenching breakup, and, most indelibly, the slow death of her younger brother from AIDS complications. And yet by the time she gets to the title poem, excerpted above, she has managed a kind of redemption, instilled a sense that every moment is thrilling in its own way, regardless of what kind of moment it is. As a reader, you believe her. Or at least, I did. The gratitude I have for this kind of reading experience is impossible to quantify but also, thankfully, impossible to shake.