Erase Genesis

“By redacting the same three chapters in different ways, I approached this book as a kind of literary translation. When I am translating, I come again and again to the source text; I come to participate in its creation. And in so doing, I am created; I am changed. I do not come to the text to assault it or upstage it. I come to know it. And in knowing it, I become a part of what really does want to be fruitful and multiply: the human imagination for connection.

The Book of Genesis can never be erased.”
— Rebecca Gayle Howell

The Berry Center

The Poetry Shop

Bookshop.org

Amazon

“This is where a masterful erasure meets Meister Eckhart, a futuristic eco-poetics for our apocalyptic age.”

Philip Metres
Author of Fugitive / Refuge
Recipient, William Carlos Williams Award
“This is a book that unties the knots of harmful tradition, a book to meditate on slowly, to hold and to be held by. This is a book to awaken any spiritual life.”

Cassidy Hall
Author of Queering Contemplation
“Erase Genesis is to be experienced, not explained. It is spell-casting, spell-binding, and by its close, spell-breaking. Here, scripture becomes sculpture. I love this book.”

George Ella Lyon
Kentucky Poet Laureate
2015 - 2017
“There is no endorsement adequate to the complexity & insight of this book.”

Mary Evelyn Tucker
Co-Founder
Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology
"Howell’s approach is ecological, a kind of crop rotation in place of the monocropping interpretive practices that have impoverished us spiritually, ecologically, and existentially. The work is nothing short of sacred."

Claire Wahmanholm
Author of Meltwater
A National Book Foundation
Science + Literature Selection

For Rebecca Gayle Howell art is a practice of place, the Earth’s intelligence, which is always specific and always divine.

Working from rural Kentucky, Howell roots in the most human of forms: the spiritual imagination—as she merges modes like myth and realism across song, poetry, and prose.

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Also an award-winning editor, she is well known for her generous precision as she helps writers locate their stories, as well as their voice.

RECENT WORK

In Print

In Music

behold

Behold is a Substack for everyday contemplatives who want to remember awe is a birthright. There, Rebecca shares her practice of attention and builds a community to do the same.

Songs, stories, and poems are systems of pattern-making. So is the universe. My life gets a whole lot more interesting when I remember that I am not just another pattern-maker, I am a part of the hum.

– Rebecca Gayle Howell

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Erase Genesis

“This is where a masterful erasure meets Meister Eckhart, a futuristic eco-poetics for our apocalyptic age.”

“This is a book that unties the knots of harmful tradition, a book to meditate on slowly, to hold and to be held by. This is a book to awaken any spiritual life.”

“Erase Genesis is to be experienced, not explained. It is spell-casting, spell-binding, and by its close, spell-breaking. Here, scripture becomes sculpture. I love this book.”

“There is no endorsement adequate to the complexity & insight of this book.”

"Howell’s approach is ecological, a kind of crop rotation in place of the monocropping interpretive practices that have impoverished us spiritually, ecologically, and existentially. The work is nothing short of sacred."