Marie Howe's 2024 retrospective wins the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
'A collection drawn from decades of work that mines the day-to-day modern experience for evidence of our shared loneliness, mortality and holiness.' – 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry Jury
American poet Marie Howe's New and Selected Poems has won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Announcement was livestreamed on 5 May 2025 from Columbia University, New York.
New and Selected Poems was published by W.W. Norton & Company in the US in July 2024, and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and Ireland in November 2024. The Bloodaxe edition has the title What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems, and is Marie Howe's first UK publication.
The $15,000 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry is awarded annually to a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. Previous Pulitzer winners have included two other books published in the UK by Bloodaxe, Repair by C.K. Williams in 2000 and The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin in 2009.
The Jury for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry comprised: Carl Phillips (Chair), Joy Harjo, Deborah Paredez, Brenda Shaughnessy and Brian Turner.
'A collection drawn from decades of work that mines the day-to-day modern experience for evidence of our shared loneliness, mortality and holiness.' – 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry Jury
Marie Howe's New and Selected Poems brings together more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from one of America’s most daring and courageous poets, and opens with twenty new poems. This retrospective draws from each of her four collections – including Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood, and What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about ageing while walking the dog, Howe is ‘a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy’ (Dorianne Laux).
More details of the poetry award are on the Pulitzer Prizes website: https://pulitzer.org/winners/22704
A video of the livestream can be seen here. The finalists and winner of the poetry category were announced from 29:06.
~~~~
Marie Howe launched What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems at Bloodaxe's joint online reading and discussion event on 8 November 2024 - scroll down for details.
Marie Howe will travelling to Ireland to read at Cork International Poetry Festival on 17 May 2025. For full details, see: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/events?articleid=1496
~~~~~
POETRY BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Sunday Independent, Books: The critics’ cut, Poetry Books of the Year, Sunday 8 December 2024
Paul Perry chose What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems for his poetry books of the year feature in Ireland’s Sunday Independent’s books of the year as chosen by the paper’s critics.
‘What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems by Marie Howe is a compelling compendium of the poet’s piercingly steady gaze at the painful truths of our lives with poems rich in forthright lyric insight.’ – Paul Perry, Sunday Independent (Poetry Books of the Year 2024)
REVIEW COVERAGE IN THE GUARDIAN
The Guardian, Poetry Books of the Month, Saturday 2 November 2024
An excellent review of What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems was included in Jennifer Lee Tsai's Poetry Books of the Month for November 2024 in The Guardian.
'This rich and luminous compilation draws from four previous collections, including the hauntingly elegiac What the Living Do (1997), a tribute to Howe’s brother, who died as a result of Aids, and Magdalene (2017), an intense exploration of womanhood. It opens with a bounteous selection of new work. [...] Howe’s poems carry an emotional depth and transcendent simplicity. There is a simultaneous earthliness and spirituality in her musings on the metaphysical revelations of the divine, the sacred and the eternal.' – Jennifer Lee Tsai, The Guardian
In print in The Guardian's Saturday magazine on 2 November 2024. Available online here.
~~~~~
ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT
Friday 8 November 2024, 7pm GMT
Online launch reading by Marie Howe, Philip Gross and David Constantine
Online launch reading by Marie Howe, Philip Gross and David Constantine, celebrating the publication of our November 2024 titles. All three poets read live and discussed their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. Now available on YouTube.
Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, 22 October 2022 - Marie Howe reads her poem 'The Singularity'
Marie Howe's poem 'The Singularity' performed by the poet. Part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation's Read By series of poetry films.
Directed by Matthew Thompson and filmed at Storm King Art Center.
'The Singularity' is included in the new poems section of Marie Howe's New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, 2024) winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2025. This retrospective is published in the UK and Ireland by Bloodaxe Books with the title What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems.
MARIE HOWE READS FROM HER COLLECTION MAGDALENE
Marie Howe: Magdalene
In her collection Magdalene (2017) Marie Howe imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape. Between facing the traumas of her past and navigating daily life, the narrator of Magdalene yearns for the guidance of her spiritual teacher, a Christ figure, whose death she continues to grieve.
Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Marie Howe reading and discussing the poems of Magdalene during her visit to Ledbury Poetry Festival in Herefordshire in July 2018. The poems included are: ‘Before the Beginning’, ‘On Men, Their Bodies’, ‘The Affliction’, ‘Magdalene: The Addict’, ‘The Landing’, ‘The Teacher’, ‘Magdalene – The Seven Devils’, ‘The Girl at 3’, ‘Walking Home’, ‘The Map’ and ‘One Day’. All these poems, apart from 'The Girl at 3', are included in What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems.
~~~~~
[06 May 2025]
