Rebecca Gayle Howell is a genre-rousing poet, librettist, and translator.
POETRY
RENDER / AN APOCALYPSE
“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
“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
“Why should you read this book? Because it is necessary, so necessary that you should keep it in your tool box along with the hammer and the box of nails.”
—Rebecca Dundon, New Madrid
Winner, Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize
Winner, Nautilus Award
Bestseller of the Decade, Small Press Distribution
Burnaway: Art of the South 2016 Book of the Year
“There’s an unexpected intimacy to such an image, 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, Los Angeles Times
“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."
—Alicia Ostriker, author of over 19 books
“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."
—John James, The Kenyon Review
"The collection is a stirring almanac of the macabre and the hard-wrought."
—Roberto Carlos Garcia, The Rumpus
“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, Pulitzer Prize winning author of five volumes of poetry
“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
“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
AMERICAN PURGATORY
“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
“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
“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."
Winner, Great Britain’s Sexton Prize
Foreword Reviews Book of the Year, finalist
Bestseller of the Decade, Small Press Distribution
— Don Share, Judge's Citation
“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
“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
“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
LIBRETTI
Recent recordings:
ST MARTINS VOICES
THE GESUALDO SIX
A WINTER BREVIARY
A Winter Breviary
Young New Yorkers’ Chorus; Alex Canovas, conductor
A Winter Breviary is a set of three interfaith eco-carols that trace a journey through the dark woods on solstice, in search of the light. The poems follow the Christian canonical hours and the music maps onto Hindustani ragas for those same hours.
Librettist, Rebecca Gayle Howell
Composer, Reena Esmail
Performed by choirs like the The Sixteen, The Yale Ensemble, Kathmandu Chorale, & the National Symphonic Chorus at Carnegie Hall
Premiered in the US by the LA Master Chorale
Premiered in the UK by the BBC Singers
Featured on BBC 3
Featured in Carols for Choirs 6
Recording featured on
Choral Music from Oxford
with the Gesualdo Six (2022)
Recording featured as the title tracks on
A Winter Breviary: Choral Works for Christmas
with St. Martin’s Voices (2023)
Published by Oxford University Press
Chorus now available from A Piece of Sky Music (ASCAP) for individual performances.
SAY YOUR NAME
Kirkland Choral Society and Philharmonia Northwest. Seattle, WA. April 27, 2024. West Coast Premiere.
We say the word “suffrage” when discussing voting rights, but do we know what it means? The word has roots in late Middle English and Latin, meaning “intercessory prayer,” the kind of prayer one offers on behalf of another. Trust the Ballot explores this connection, understanding that when we vote we don’t just voice our own opinion. We join our neighbors in a sacred act that is both solitary and communal, together praying to our larger democratic will for human rights and a prosperous commonwealth.
“Suffrage” means: it is to each other we belong.
— Rebecca Gayle Howell
Librettist, Rebecca Gayle Howell
Composer, Reena Esmail
Say Your Name is a voting-rights cantata composed by Reena Esmail and written by Rebecca Gayle Howell. Here is the resilient story of a woman named Democracy, a woman battered by gaslighting and confusion. As she finds the courage to remember who she is, she learns what we all must: that to guard our thoughts is to guard our nation.
Say Your Name was premiered on the West Coast on April 27, 2024 by the Kirkland Choral Society and Philharmonia Northwest in Seattle, WA, featuring soloists Stacey Mastrian and Danielle Reutter-Harrah and introduced by Charles Douglas III, Executive Director of Common Power.
Originally commissioned by Amherst College Choir and Orchestra and premiered on the East Coast on November 5, 2022 at Amherst College, Amherst MA by Sherezade Panthaki, soprano; Alice Rogers, soprano; Amherst Choir and orchestra, Arianne Abela, conductor.
INTERGLOW
Kirkland Choral Society and Philharmonia Northwest. Seattle, WA. April 27, 2024. West Coast Premiere.
Librettist, Rebecca Gayle Howell
Composer, Reena Esmail
Interglow is a call-and-response community meditation, written for the COVID-19 quarantine. Commissioned by Salistina Los Angeles and premiered on February 12, 2021. Published by A Piece of Sky Music (ASCAP).
Interglow is written for audience participation. Want to contribute your voices to Interglow? Find out more here.
TRANSLATIONS
EL INTERIOR DE LA BALLENA
THE BELLY OF THE WHALE
The bilingual edition of Claudia Prado’s acclaimed novel-in-verse of Patagonia
Translated by Rebecca Gayle Howell
“Ironía y memoria, inocencia y parodia. En su poesía impecable, sutil, Claudia Prado canta un mundo inefable—tal como lo hace su abuela—desde una galería que siempre da al mar.”
“Irony and memory, innocence and parody. In her impeccable, subtle poetry, Claudia Prado sings of an ineffable world— just as her grandmother does—from a gallery that forever looks upon the sea.”
—Cristian Aliaga, Music for Unknown Journeys: New & Selected Prose Poems (traducción de/trans. Ben Bollig)
“A toda genealogía le llega su poeta: en El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale, Claudia Prado recupera un siglo de relato familiar y vuelve a darle vida a través del detalle. El pasado se representa una vez más pero con una música nueva.”
“Every genealogy has its poet: in El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale, Claudia Prado recovers a century-long family story through detail. Here the past is resurrected by new music.”
—Laura Wittner, Lugares donde una no está—Poemas 1996–2016
“Mis elogios a Claudia Prado y Rebecca Gayle Howell por esta rigurosa colaboración entre dos poetas y dos traductoras. El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale es registro y exposición de la ardua tarea de transmitir las historias familiares de la lucha de los inmigrantes —el trabajo, el amor, la pérdida, el interminable viaje a través del amplio desierto del sur, la meseta patagónica, tan parecido a la gran migración a través de las llanuras del norte—. Estos poemas brillantes de las Américas resuenan con una música particular tanto en español como en inglés, mostrando el cuidado y la diligencia que estas escritoras han ofrecido a las preciadas voces del pasado que siguen resonando en nosotros hoy.”
“Praise to Claudia Prado and Rebecca Gayle Howell for this rigorous collaboration between two poets and two translators. El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale is a documentation, an exposition of the hard work of carrying across family stories of the immigrants' struggle—their labor, their love, their loss, their endless journeying—through the vast desert of the south, the Patagonian Plateau, so much like the great migration across the plains in the north. These shimmering poems of the Americas reverberate distinct music in both Spanish and English, demonstrating for us the care and diligence these writers have given to the cherished voices of the past that continue to echo in us today.”
—Curtis Bauer, American Selfie (trans. Natalia Carabajosa)
“El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale es un libro íntegramente bilingüe que sigue el viaje migratorio de una familia a través de la Patagonia, lo hace mediante un examen empoderado y celebrando los orígenes. La poeta Claudia Prado reimagina las historias transmitidas de generación en generación, destacando la fortaleza silenciosa y el papel fundamental de las mujeres. Las traducciones de Rebecca Gayle Howell nos recuerdan, ahora más que nunca, que las diferencias ‘nos llevan a necesitarnos unos a otros.’ Quedé tan cautivado que me senté y leí todo el libro de una vez.”
“Fully bilingual, El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale follows one family’s migratory journey through Patagonia in an empowered examination and celebration of ancestry. Poet Claudia Prado has reimagined tales passed down for generations, spotlighting the silent endurance and pivotal roles of women, while Rebecca Gayle Howell’s translations remind us now more than ever that differences ‘require us to need each other.’ I was so mesmerized that I read the book in one sitting.”
—Ruben Quesada, ed., Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry
“Estos poemas de Claudia Prado me vuelven a emocionar como veinticinco años atrás. Un siglo de historias familiares durmiendo en el interior de la ballena, en su Madryn patagónico donde me llevó a conocerlas, tan inmensas y tan dulces como sus bellos poemas.”
“These poems by Claudia Prado move me just as they did twenty-five years ago. A century of family stories sleeping inside the whale, set in the Patagonian Madryn where Prado once showed me her whales, immense and sweet as her beautiful poems.”
—Diana Bellessi, Tener lo que se tiene
“El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale es tan asombroso, conmovedor y lleno de matices como la experiencia de mirar fotos a través de un estereoscopio. Claudia Prado escribió un libro de una belleza austera y precisa, en el que se entretejen relatos de migración, pérdida y trabajo; la lucha y la transformación de las mujeres a lo largo del tiempo; un paisaje formidable y el misterioso vínculo -en parte invitación, en parte imposición- con sus habitantes. Las traducciones de Rebecca Gayle Howell son minuciosas, brillantes, seguras, profundamente vivas. Tanto en español como en inglés, estos poemas traen a la ‘vida’ historias íntimas, pero también cambian algo en los ojos con los que se mira, con los que se vive.”
“El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale is as startling, transportative, and rich as the experience of peering at photos through a stereoscope. Claudia Prado has written a book of stark, exacting beauty, laced with stories of migration, loss, labor, the struggles and transformations of women over time, a formidable landscape and the mysterious bonds it invites and imposes on its inhabitants. Rebecca Gayle Howell’s translations are whittled, gleaming, confident, utterly alive. In both Spanish and English, these poems not only bring intimate histories ‘to life’ but also change something in the eyes that do the looking, the living.”
—Robin Myers (trans.), The Law of Conservation by Mariana Spada
“El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale es un libro extraordinario. Claudia Prado nos regala una poesía capaz de albergar las historias de varias generaciones de una familia y su herencia de silencios. Estos poemas respiran dentro de las dualidades que viven quienes han nacido entre dos culturas y dos lenguas. . . . En la excelente versión en inglés de Rebecca Gayle Howell, estas dualidades resucitan en la migración perpetua de la traducción. Estoy profundamente conmovido.”
“El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale is brilliant. Claudia Prado has given us poetry capable of holding the stories of a family’s generations and the silences of legacy. These are poems that breathe into the dualities lived by those who are born to two cultures and two languages. . . . In Rebecca Gayle Howell’s masterful English version, these dualities resurrect—giving us a perennial migration of translation. I am deeply touched.”
—Luis Alberto Ambroggio, North American Academy of Spanish Language & The Royal Spanish Academy
HAGAR BEFORE THE OCCUPATION
HAGAR AFTER THE OCCUPATION
A memoir-in-verse of the Iraq War
Poems by Amal al-Jubouri
Translations by Rebecca Gayle Howell
The Best Translated Book Award, finalist
Winner, Jules Chametzky Prize
The Banipal Translation Prize, finalist
“In spare, vivid, and poundingly heartfelt language, [al-Jubouri] shows us her country before the occupation by U.S. troops and afterward . . . these poems have a timeless, haunting quality, and they offer not just enormous pleasure but understanding.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“Hagar is much more a book about poetry as witness and response to war, violence, and suffering, and about the poet struggling with her chosen medium, than about registering a personal reaction to the American occupation. ”
“. . . this poetry inhales and exhales; breathes, thrives. . . . this work will live on. . . it will have a life of its own for decades to come. ”
—Hayden’s Ferry Review
“In a series of before-and-after poems, Amal al-Jubouri describes the changes in day-to-day action and mood in Baghdad and greater Iraq after the invasion by American forces and the fall of the Ba’ath Party in 2003. And she does this with much honesty and grace.”
—New Pages
“Amal al-Jubouri’s poems are essentially about exile, exile from the country of her youth, exile from peace, from love, from normalcy, from hope. They are courageous, honest, bitter, and beautiful. They are as ghosts, wandering over the rivers, looking for a home. I want to ask forgiveness of these ghosts. And rock them to sleep. I bless the Iraqi dead, as she does.”
—Gerald Stern
“In Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation, we see how the political writes itself on everything that is personal—one’s speech and body, one’s sense of freedom and of love. Rebecca Gayle Howell’s translation, with Husam Qaisi, is stunning in how it creates a powerful, contemporary voice speaking to us directly with warmth and suffering, and yet also carries over the poems’ connection to Arabic literary traditions. The language of the poems marry present and past, which is a feat of translatorly skill and innovation.”
—Three Percent
“Poet and translator Rebecca Howell, together with Husam Qaisi, has transported Amal al-Jubouri’s moving cri de coeur across the precarious bridge between Arabic and English as well as the cultural, political, and ethical chasm separating Iraq and the United States. This is poetry necessary to our times, and we owe the makers of this work in English an enormous debt of gratitude.”
