Susan Elizabeth Howe

Traveling “the undiscovered country” | Stephen Carter, ed., Moth and Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death

Death comes into our lives all too often; we don’t seek it out. As much as possible, we focus on essential, everyday concerns and keep death in the distance, at the edge of the horizon.…

The Goodness of Created Things

Amber, formerly pine sap where ant wings settled, feathers, the occasional 
tiny frog. A drop of the Jurassic Age I wear around my neck.  

A Chop Wizard with its plastic cup, blades, hand crank tearing into the 
onion like a cheetah, membrane and flesh.

My Sadness

My sadness eats sauerkraut because she’s allergic to sauerkraut.

My sadness roams heating ducts, shuffling through the lint.  My sadness sharpens her teeth.  

My sadness starts the avalanche she gets caught in. Then I can’t breathe.

The Skin of the Story

Three of her children were taken:  

one whispered  
out of life by a flapping heart,

The Unreliable Narrator: Or, A Detour Through Pecadillo | Patricia Hart Molen, Little Sins

“What was a nice girl like Florence doing in a Cuban bordello—stone cold dead?” As the question from the cover indicates, this paperback is packaged to sell as a murder mystery, the kind one picks…

Ovum

The egg insists on its own reality, 
So I go along, easy, not one 
To counter what I don’t know. 

Celebrations | Emma Lou Thayne, Things Happen: Poems of Survival

The publication of a new book of poetry is an occasion for celebration, particularly when the poetry is by such a generous and great-hearted soul as Emma Lou Thayne. But the title of this volume,…

I Am Watching Four Canada Geese

in a perfect diamond of flight 
slip between me and the sky, circle 
toward rest and cover for the night. 
The lake is a polished absurdity 

“I Do Remember How It Smelled Heavenly”: Mormon Aspects of May Swenson’s Poetry

Any discussion of Mormon culture or doctrine in the work of nationally prominent American poet May Swenson must begin with the caveat that Swenson, for virtually all of her adult life, was not a believing…

The Danish Genesis of Virginia Sorensen’s Lotte’s Locket

[1]Describing her research for The Proper Gods, a novel about the Yaqui Indians and their culture, Virginia Sorensen said her work had been “an excursion into cultural anthropology” that she thought would continue the rest…