The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken

The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken. Fanny Howe. New York: Nightboat Books, 2005. $16.95 ISBN 0-9767185-1-0

In Fanny Howe’s dual collection of lyric prose, The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken, narrators tangle in thoughts and landscapes that are both stark and lovely. The Lives of a Spirit was brought back into publication in this collection with Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken at once distinctive from and absolutely connected to this earlier work.

The narration of both collections often exists with the third person interwoven with a floating “I”, narration that, in Glasstown, shifts genders as well. Birth and d—th, eternity, G-d, human nature, the prose twists through landscapes of water and glass and cold, cityscapes and trees, and poses questions which often leads to new landscapes and new questions. Howe follows the path of consciousness, capturing the interior of the self. Every nuance in nature and the human spirit, the mechanics of both, is magnified and directed inward. In all of this she never fails to tell a story.

We are dug so deeply into place and into the spirit that the journey taken is at once the narrators’ and our own. The final lines from the opening chapter of The Lives of a Spirit prepare us for that journey. “Now nestled in sea heather, the baby will, later, learn her tens and alphabets on a pillow in bed. And will sometimes wonder: Little word, who said me? Am I owned or am I free?”

Text becomes art throughout the collection in the form of handwritten text overwritten with handwritten text. These installations pull us out of the text enough to reconnect with the work as text and with the author. It is then that we recognize this traveling spirit as gift, its resonance conjuring metaphysic questioning and journeys of our own making.

-Donna Epler