William R. Howe

Dickinson said that it's poetry if you feel as though the top of your head were taken off. But what if it’s the whole head, down to the shoulders? (Insert Goya image of Saturn and child here.) Howe’s “translanations” are in one sense disfigurations—horrendous manglings that shock not just because of their audacity in taking such liberties with their source texts, but because of the glistening viscera they expose. —K. Silem Mohammad