AMERICAN PURGATORY
A novel-in-verse by Rebecca Gayle Howell
Winner, Great Britain’s Sexton Prize
Bestselling Book of the Decade by SPD
Named a must-read book by The Millions,
The Courier-Journal, and Poetry London
Critical praise from The Rumpus, ArtATL,
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Nashville Review,
St. Louis Magazine, and others
Foreword Reviews Book of the Year, finalist
"What makes this collection deeply compelling is its unrelenting use of narrative to sustain a totalising image of a plausible American apocalypse, such that each prose poem becomes an indispensable thread in a collection which is biblical in its scope."
— Mary Jean Chan for Poetry London
"Post-apocalyptic poetry is a thrilling idea, because while we are inundated with fiction that concerns itself with survival of a way of life in a transformed world, poetry has always been about survival of the self. American Purgatory separates itself by combining the setting and scenery of the former with the immediacy of the latter."
— Michael Pittard, for storySouth
"Howell knows we are all scholars of the American late-capitalist experience, and feel the threads of evangelical religion, classical mythology, rearing, thirst, climate change, disability, gender, exploitation, and social-stratification. All readers will see Golgotha repeating."
— Alicia Marie Brandewie, The Nashville Review
“With echoes of Phil Levine, Zora Neale Hurston, and Cormac McCarthy, Howell reconstructs hope after the decimation of the American Dream. After all, purgatory is a temporary space, and in the last poem, “Everyone Was Born Here,” birth pains pass to promise: “O the new rooms of rain. / We will float and drink years of rain.” American Purgatory is a vital collection that could easily be situated in contemporary headlines; its acumen is that of warning and survival.”
— Rachel Morgan, North American Review
"American Purgatory is a visionary work, and Howell urgently reminds us why our planet and the lives of others are worth fighting to protect—and that although the choice to act still lies before us, it can be taken from us at any moment."
— L.S. McKee, ArtsATL
"The poems themselves are often short and atmospheric, living things crackling with dangerous energy. They look into the darkest parts of humanity and force us to look with them."
— Kelly Lynn Thomas, The Rumpus
"American Purgatory is a tantalizing prophecy that predicts one of the many possible futures at the logical end of capitalism."
— Kent Weigle, Rain Taxi
"American Purgatory is, to my mind, not only one of the finest books of the year, but one of those books that will be remembered and read long after the winds have vaporized us all."
— Raphael Maurice, St. Louis Magazine
"Every once in awhile, poetry needs to say to novels: I’ve been around longer, and I can tell stories better. Howell’s the kind of poet who can announce the apocalypse in a whisper."
— Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
"American Purgatory is extraordinary. You can read it in an hour, maybe, if you’re the sort of straight-through reader who doesn’t at least occasionally drop your book to your lap and stare off into the middle distance working out the implicit horrors of what you’ve just read. In terms of time it’ll cost you no more than an episode of The Walking Dead. And it will scare you deeper."
— Phillip Martin for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Sunday edition
“American Purgatory by Rebecca Gayle Howell is a remarkable new book, not only for the author’s imagination and writing skill, but for the timing of its release during this period of political unease."
— Jayne Moore Waldrop, Courier-Journal
"The narrator's elliptical interior monologues are mesmerizing meditations on natural life and existential terror."
— Jackson Meazle, Arkansas Times
American Purgatory is a FORCE of a book. With striking passion, revelatory insight, eerie visionary turn-abouts, haunting threads of hymnology, and a giant gift of precision and sensitive care, Rebecca Gayle Howell creates an unforgettably potent world in her poems - labor so often lived and borne, so rarely described.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
In scriptural cadences and the earthen voice of a woman laboring under a sky of pesticides, Rebecca Gayle Howell imagines, with lyric ferocity and razor perception, a near-future dystopia lived by “persons held to service and labor,” in the wide, ruined fields of industrial agribusiness. It is a world of scarce water and thirsty cotton, with strong echoes of the shameful past of abduction and enslavement that built the wealth of the United States. In American Purgatory we meet Brother Slade, The Kid, a man called Little, and the chemically deformed “Brutes.” Howell is our twenty-first century Virgil, waving “the flag of warning,” on the precipice of a ruined world. Our world. The clear-eyed courage at work here reminds me of the honest power of C.D. Wright. She would recognize in Howell a sister poet. This is a poetic work for our moment and the time is now.
—Carolyn Forché
“The title of Rebecca Gayle Howell’s American Purgatory - like the book itself - is surprising in its juxtapositions. One thinks more of the geography of Dante than that of the United States when we think of the condition or place of being spiritually purified. Moreover, as the epic poet made clear, purgation is a state of temporary expiation: we are purged from sin on our way to another, presumably better, place. But where might that be? In Howell’s haunting and distinctive vision of the American South "No one was born here. We are persons held to service and labor," condemned to suffering a precarious, dangerous landscape replete with worms, snakes, dust, drought, and wind. There’s work, and then more work to be done, in awful circumstances; yet fishing in dry rivers is somehow possible, thirsty weeds of cotton manage to straggle and grow. Amid the moon lowering and dogs barking, there remains prophecy, and stories get told. There may be groans instead of song, humming rather than intelligible words, but the stories get told, and Howell tells them, too - unforgettably and redemptively - with grace, eyes open. "We reap," she assures us with glimmers of hope, "What we show."
— Don Share, Judge's Citation
RENDER / AN APOCALYPSE
A novel-in-verse by Rebecca Gayle Howell
Winner, CSU First Book Prize
Winner, The Nautilus Award
Bestselling Book of the Decade, SPD
A Best Book of 2016, Burnaway
Critical praise from The Los Angeles Times,
The Kenyon Review, New Pages, The Rumpus,
Denver Quarterly, Cutbank and others
Featured in Apocalypse in American
Literature and Culture
Foreword Reviews Book of the Year, finalist
Each printing is a limited edition
“America has a rich literature of farm life, its pleasures, struggles and tragedies—most of it in the form of fiction, from Cather’s My Antonia to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Rural life has always inspired poetry as well, much of it romantic and sentimental, some of it striving for realism. Recent superb poets of farm life are Wendell Berry and Maxine Kumin. But there has never been anything as trenchant, as fierce, as Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse.”
“I want to truly inhabit where I live, and I want to write from within that intimacy. We talk about “nature poetry” or “eco-poetry” but I don’t love those phrases—as they seem to imply that any one landscape can be written about in a way that can be exchanged with another. I don’t think that can be. The intelligence that we generically call the natural world is specific to its own place. Believe me, a storm in West Texas is quite, quite different from a storm in Knott County, Kentucky. What grows, grows differently. This is true for flora and fauna, and I think it is also true for the human imagination. Or, can be. I want to tune my thoughts, my ear, my being to the land I am in, learn from it. I’m not interested in place as ‘setting.’ I’m interested in place as ‘teacher’.”
- Read Render’s 10th anniversary interview with Rebecca Gayle Howell
“Readers of Rebecca Gayle Howell’s brilliant lyric work Render / An Apocalypse might find themselves, from the moment they encounter its first poem, a bit puzzled by the book’s professed apocalyptic subject matter…. If Render / An Apocalypse is poised to offer its readers a myriad means of caring about and tending to the plants and animals that its speaker lives on for sustenance, nevertheless, Howell refuses to capitalize on those affective solicitations.”
- Jennifer Ashton, 10th Anniversary Celebration & Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture
“There's an unexpected intimacy...a sense of the physicality of life, of death and of endurance, which in the end is all we have. Howell gets at all of this with precision, pitiless but not unfeeling, knee-deep, waist-deep in the world.”
— David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
“This crushing book of poems came into my life at just the right moment: in the middle of personal upheaval and just a couple of days before the election.”
— Sarah Higgins, Burnaway: Art of the South, 2016 Book of the Year
“Explicitly, these poems charge us to observe the natural world, but implicitly, they urge us to question our perceptual structures, deconstructing the power hierarchies we impose and dispelling the infallibility of the systems we use to organize our understanding of it.”
— John James, The Kenyon Review
“The collection is a stirring almanac of the macabre and the hard-wrought.”
— Roberto Carlos Garcia, The Rumpus
“Our current moment of near-total disassociation from the sources of the food we eat requires equipment for re-engagement: to shatter the pastoral fantasy being marketed by industrial agriculture multinationals that bears so little resemblance to actual production methods. The apocalypse, in at least one sense, is upon us. Howell’s poems render our awareness with humor, urgency, and courage.”
—Sean Pears, Denver Quarterly
“The poems in Render see the world sharply.”
— Emily May Anderson, New Pages
“Though Render/ An Apocalypse is no light verse, it is peculiar and inventive. Howell successfully crafts a raw experience that lets us savor the conflicting instances of tenderness and brutality between humans and animals in new and exciting ways.”
— Erica Kenick, Gulf Stream Magazine
“Howell has given the literary world a truly unique offering, which finds the common ground between poetry, horror, and (human) nature.”
— Michael Schmeltzer, CutBank
“Howell’s poems are everything I crave in poetry—direct, hard poems that knock the reader in the teeth yet twist with the elegance of a swinging hatchet blade.”
— Julia Bouwsma, Connotation Press
“[Render] alerts us to one possible atavistic role to which poetry may yet be restored, the passing-down of communal knowledge and expertise...The poems do not assume that role simply or straightforwardly (there is a lot going on in any one of the poems), but the relationship to that role makes for a viscerality to the poems that lends them force.”
— H.L. Hix, In Quire
“These poems are fiercely intelligent.”
— Frederick Smock, The Courier-Journal
“Howell has written a book of urgency and tenderness, worry and wisdom. Without a trace of irony, she uses imagery rooted in the past to speak to the present. The result is a chilling, beautiful, and necessary collection. The poems in Render / An Apocalypse will stay with you long after you close the book.”
— Chloe Honum, On the Seawall
“This is the book you want with you in the cellar when the tornado is upstairs taking your house and your farm. It's the book you want in the bomb shelter, and in the stalled car, in the kitchen waiting for the kids to come home, in the library when the library books are burned. Its instructions are clear and urgent. Rebecca Gayle Howell has pressed her face to the face of the actual animal world. She remembers everything we have forgotten. Read this! It's not too late. We can start over from right here and right now.”
— Marie Howe
“In every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading Render how deeply I was handing everything over.”
— Nikky Finney
“Rebecca Gayle Howell has written a frightening, truth-telling book. Sparse and necessary, her voice has the southern bite of Flannery O'Connor. She erases the lines between butchering, cruelty to animals, subsistence living, and the underbelly of wildness and love that is murdered in all of us. Howell's words will haunt: This is how we are civilized."
— Anne Marie Macari
“Stark and unembellished, the poems in Render have the effect of looking at a rusted hatchet buried in a stump. We are presented a world driven by action and instinct, our hands in death at every turn. Is this the world we're moving toward? Or, is this the world we've lived in from the start? Rebecca Gayle Howell has written a subtle and sobering book, a collection of poems cut with cold precision.”
— Maurice Manning
“To enter into these poems one must be fully committed, as the poet is, to seeing this world as it is, to staying with it, moment by moment, day by day. Yet these poems hold a dark promise: this is how you can do it, but you must be fully engaged, which means you must be fully awake, you must wake up inside it. As we proceed, the how-to of the beginning poems subtly transforms, as the animals (or, more specifically, the livestock) we are engaging begin to, more and more, become part of us, literally and figuratively—we enter inside of that which we devour.”
— Nick Flynn, from the foreword