Reading Susan Howe

On the large table that used to be a tree I’ve set out the Susan Howe books I’ve been most thrilled by over the last four years.

My engagement with her work came late. It began in 2015 when I read her essay Vagrancy In The Park during my lunch hour at the legendary and now defunct Barwon Booksellers in Geelong. Those lunch hours were not so much breaks from work as augmentations of what we in the bookshop were already immersed in: words, lines, sentences, paper, bindings, endpapers, boards and covers, the way the polytemporal community of the page was able to speak to one another in the most likely and unlikely ways.