On the final page of Fanny Howe’s final book, she asks:

xxxxxWorld of wretches and the exploited
xxxxxOf the accidentally destroyed
xxxxxThe strike of each heart
xxxxxIn the distant body
xxxxxUps the odds that there’s a God but why?

Perhaps this question, both theological and political, can’t be answered so much as approached, with skepticism and reverence. Reverence for the wretches and the exploited, identical to reverence for the possibility of there being a God. Skepticism as a function of doubt, doubt being, as Howe explains elsewhere “what allows / a single gesture / to have a heart.”

Across her poems, essays, and novels, Fanny Howe is rigorous and mystifying, pathetic and ecstatic, Boston Irish, Catholic, totally committed to solidarity with the world’s marginalized and dispossessed. The geography of her analysis folds, collapses, and cycles, such that when she speaks of the “distant body” in the lines above, she in fact recognizes this body’s fundamental proximity, to be found at the site of the heart, where a paradox is a void only insofar as a void contains a universe.

In this feminist reading group, we will ask her questions with her—of faith and divinity, of suffering and transcendence, of family and history, of radical love. New readers and Howe heads both welcome. We will begin with This Poor Book, and make our way around O’Clock, Night Philosophy, What Did I Do Wrong?, London-rose, Economics, The Needle’s Eye, and Introduction to the World, with potential excursions to follow our collective desires.

Access information: The meeting room is in the basement of the Rectory. Access involves one flight of stairs up from street level (with a handrail; no elevator), followed by a second flight of stairs to the basement.