When her work first came to attention in the 1970s she was loosely associated with the avant-garde grouping known as the language writers, appearing in the influential anthology In the American Tree. She formed friendships with two prominent language writers, Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian (the latter principally by correspondence). However, Howe’s work often looked out of place in this company and her later development shows her to have marked differences to many writers of that generation. Among these are a commitment to a dense and refactory version of lyric, to canonical …