[2] Her subsequent collections include What the Living Do (1997), The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), and Magdalene (2017), which was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry.

[6]In the 1960’s Howe enrolled in the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a socially progressive, parochial all-girls school, where the nuns centered what Theology has to do with “social justice, service, questioning, and authority.”[6] Howe would later observe that “it was there that I began to appreciate that spirituality could be rigors, imaginative and an essential part of living in the physical world.”[6] During this time she would spend “hours lying in the bathtub” reading from The Lives of Saints, which would become her first example of “women who were the subjects of their own lives, not objects.”[6] Howe would later attend the University of Windsor, a historically Roman Catholic university in Ontario, Canada, where she earned a BA in English.

In 1980 she received a fellowship to the Summer Humanities Institute at Dartmouth College, where she had applied to study Philosophy, but ended up enrolling in a creative writing workshop.

At the suggestion of an instructor in a writers' workshop, Howe applied to and was accepted at Columbia University where she studied with Stanley Kunitz and received her M.F.A.

[13] In 1995, Howe co-edited, with Michael Klein, a collection of essays, letters, and stories entitled In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.

Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review.

[18] Her work explores the nature of the soul and the self through literary themes of life, death, love, pain, hope, despair, sin, virtue, solitude, community, impermanence, and the eternal.

[19] Despite the strong themes in her writing, Howe subtly expresses these messages through the explanation of daily tasks and regular lifestyles in most of her poems.

Margaret Atwood, who chose this book for the National Poetry Series, praised Howe’s “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.”[18] Additionally, Stanley Kunitz noted, “Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.” Such an esteemed review justified the selection of The Good Thief for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets.

It is best put by playwright Eve Ensler, who describes her poems as “a guide to living on the brink of the mystical and the mundane.”[19] Poetry Collections Anthologies