Love’s Last Number

Love's Last Number
Poetry

Love’s Last Number

Finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize

"Howell approaches this enormous task through the senses, via the small things, and in language that’s both mesmerizing and plain-spoken. This is a book you’ll read in a sitting, and then return to all your life.”—LAURA KASISCHKE
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From celebrated poet Christopher Howell, Love’s Last Number is a series of musings on time’s arrow: on both the relentless march that divides each moment into past, present, and future—before and after—and the ultimately porous and recursive nature of time itself. In a multiplicity of voices and tones, Love’s Last Number reflects on what we do about memory, love, grief, war, and the contradictions implicit in the human search for meaning. At once profoundly intimate and ambitiously broad in scope, this collection explores the place of individual losses and joys in the context of greater historical tragedy and triumph.

In its sinuous sequences, Love’s Last Number insists that life—and history—are a continuing crisis of faith, imagination, consciousness, and moral clarity. And yet these poems, like existence itself, offer moments of transcendent joy and sudden, inexplicable hilarity: laughter against the darkness. 

ISBN:
9781571314758
Publish Date: 
02/14/2017
Pages: 
130
Size: 
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.31 in
Weight: 
5.8 oz
Author
Christopher Howell

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze and Love’s Last Number, which was a finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize. He teaches at Eastern Washington University, where he is also director of Willow Springs Books, as well as director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.

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