Books by Christopher Howell

Born in Portland, Oregon, Christopher Howell is author of a dozen poetry collections, including Love¿s Last Number, Gaze, and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected. He has received numerous honors, including the Washington State Book Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust, and three Pushcart Prizes. A military journalist during the Vietnam War, he has been for many years director and principal editor for Lynx House Press and now lives in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches in Eastern Washington University¿s master of fine arts in creative writing program.

Part of the "Pacific Northwest Poetry" series, this collection of poems presents us with a spiritual paradox. The speaker remembers an earlier time of happiness, freedom, and a certain innocence. "How we live" is its major inquiry; its illustration, and the poems' major achievement.

How do we live, in our dailiness, in our loves, our private and global wars? 'And, in the face of unbearable grief, how can we live?' Attempting to answer these questions, this is the fourth in the "Pacific Northwest Poetry" series. 'How we live' is the book's major inquiry; its illustration, and the poems' major achievement.

This generous volume of new and selected poems by Christopher Howell encompasses three decades of his distinguished work, drawing upon all of his previous books. Dreamless and Possible chronicles his wide range of interests, expressed by blending elements of the surreal with biography, imagist economy with a storytellers informality. It also shows the development of his signature style, reflected, as poet Albert Goldbarth has written, in poems connected by deep thought worn lightly, and by large vision writ in small details.These are poems of palpable force. Howell thinks out loud as he works his way through what charms, challenges, and defines the human project. He questions, tests images and associations, and leaps, trusting himself, into midair. In consequence, the cerebral energy propels his poems beyond statement and into startlingly evocative modes, grappling with and sifting profound matters of memory, imagination, and grief, tempered always by joy.