Great Regulars: So, too, the sequence of poems in the second half

of the book in which [Gayle] Howell likens slaughtering a pig to a kind of lovemaking; "Don't miss/shoot her square," she writes in "How to Be a Man," before concluding, "The black-dawn air/cold and mean//The wet fog your breath/Or is it hers."

There's an unexpected intimacy to such an image, a sense of the physicality of life, of death and of endurance, which in the end is all we have. Howell gets at all of this with precision, pitiless but not unfeeling, knee-deep, waist-deep in the world.

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: Rebecca Gayle Howell's apocalyptic poetry collection, 'Render'

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