That This

What treasures of knowledge we cluster around. That This is a collection in three pieces. Disappearance Approach, an essay about Howe's husband's sudden death--land of darkness or darkness itself you shadow mouth--begins the book with paintings by Poussin, an autopsy, Sarah Edwards and her sister-in-law Hannah, phantoms, and elusive remnants. Frolic Architecture, the second section--inspired by visits to the vast 18th-century Jonathan Edwards archives at the Beinecke and accompanied by six photograms by James Welling--presents hauntingly lovely, oblique type-collages of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary entries that Howe (with scissors, invisible Scotch Tape, and a Canon copier) has twisted, flattened, and snipped into inscapes of force. The final section, That This, delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal, with their orderly appearance packing startling power: That this book is a history of a shadow that is a shadow of Me mystically one in another another another to subserve.