Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Marie Howe is the author of four volumes of poetry: Magdalene: Poems, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, What the Living Do, and The Good Thief. She is also the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. More about this author >
Magdalene imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape— hailing a cab, raising a child, listening to the news on the radio. Between facing the traumas of her past and navigating daily life, the narrator of Magdalene yearns for the guidance of her spiritual teacher, a Christ figure, whose death she continues to grieve. Erotic, spirited, and searching for meaning, she is a woman striving to be the subject of her own life, fully human and alive to the sacred in the mortal world.
