"Fanny Howe"

Over the past four decades, Fanny Howe has created a formally innovative and politically committed body of poetry that marks her as an iconoclast even in the context of the avant-garde poetry scene in the United States. While Howe's earlier work was, according to Lynn Keller, characterised by relatively unadventurous poems `often depicting female dependency and despondency', that stayed `largely within the conventions of lyric', each succeeding decade finds Howe becoming increasingly ambitious in terms of both content and form.