What treasures of knowledge we cluster around. That This is a collection in three pieces. Disappearance Approach, an essay about Howe's husband's sudden death-land of darkness or darkness itself you shadow mouth-begins the book with paintings by Poussin, an autopsy, Sarah Edwards and her sister-in-law Hannah, phantoms, and elusive remnants. Frolic Architecture, the second section-inspired by visits to the vast 18th-century Jonathan Edwards archives at the Beinecke and accompanied by six photograms by James Welling-presents hauntingly lovely, oblique type-collages of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary entries that Howe (with scissors, invisible Scotch Tape, and a Canon copier) has twisted, flattened, and snipped into inscapes of force. The final section, That This, delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal, with their orderly appearance packing startling power:

That this book is a history of
a shadow that is a shadow of


Me mystically one in another
another another to subserve.