Marie Howe, former poet laureate of New York, is the author of The Good Thief, What the Living Do, and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Her National Book Award-nominated collection, Magdalene (W.W. Norton) 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 news on the radio. 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. Stanley Kunitz writes “Marie Howe’s poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life.”
