[1] Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre (fiction, essay, prose and poetry).

Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.

[6] Her father Mark De Wolfe Howe, was a professor at Harvard Law School and became the official biographer of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The widowed poet married again, to Peter Hewitt Hare, a philosopher and professor at the University of Buffalo.

[8] Howe is an author of a number of books of poetry, including Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974−1979 (1996) and The Midnight (2003), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Bed Hangings with Susan Bee (2001),Souls of the Labadie Track, (2007) Frolic Architecture, (2010), "Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives" (2014) and That This (2010), and three books of criticism, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), "The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems" (2013) and My Emily Dickinson (1985).

Howe began publishing poetry with Hinge Picture in 1974 and was initially received as a part of the amorphous grouping of experimental writers known as the language poets-writers such as Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman.

[11] The results were released on five CD's: Thiefth (featuring the poems Thorow and Melville's Marginalia), Songs of the Labadie Tract, Frolic Architecture, Woodslippercounterclatter, and Concordance.