Description: Pierce-Arrow takes as its shooting off point the figure of Charles S. Peirce, the allusive late nineteenth-century philosopher-scientist and founder of pragmatism, a man always on the periphery of the academic and social establishments yet intimately conjoined with them by birth and upbringing.
Brief description: Susan Howe has won the Bollingen Prize, the Frost Medal, and the Griffin Award. She is the author of such seminal works as Debths, ThatThis, TheMidnight, MyEmilyDickinson, TheQuarry, and TheBirthmark.
Review Quotes: Susan Howe's imaginative and irresistible re-creation of' the hidden life of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, his relationship with the mysterious 'gypsy' wife Juliette, his worldly failures and spiritual triumphs, has the intensity of a Jamesian novel in which the figure in the carpet--in this case a figure comprised of Peirce's astonishing visual texts, scenes from the Iliad, from the poems of Swinburne and Meredith, and finally the Tristan and Iseult legend--crystallize in an overarching vision of the poet's own desire--and failure--to achieve oneness, union with another self. Part narrative, part lyric, this profound memory poem conveys, as do few poems of our time, what Howe refers to as 'Mind's trajected light.'--Marjorie Perloff