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Eden Incarnadine, or The Authentic History of the Terrible Harpes

Author(s):
Dan Howell
Book summary:

The true story of the Harpe brothers, serial killers in frontier Kentucky, narrated in blank verse by a mid-19th century American named Jeremiah Humm, and edited by the American historian, Lyman Copeland Draper.

Publication year:
2019
Publisher:
Broadstone Books
Praise:
Quote:
“Dan Howell’s Eden Incarnadine, or The Authentic History of the Terrible Harpes is Poe’s American Gothic crossing the mountains into frontier Kentucky and set to verse, a narrative poem rooted in the history of Kentucky’s earliest serial killers, brothers Micajah and Wiley Harpe. Howell’s chilling excursion into a buckskin dystopia explores the dark careers of 'two of the more purely evil creatures ever to befoul this continent.' Howell unrelentingly and artfully brings it all alive.”
Credit:
Richard Taylor, former Kentucky Poet Laureate & author of Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape
Quote:
“Eden Incarnadine is a wildly inventive, gut-punch of a poem. I’ve never read anything quite like it. It is at once experimental and grounded in tradition. Howell inhabits an earlier American idiom and never hits a flat note. If Cormac McCarthy wrote poetry, it would sound like this.”
Credit:
Erik Reece, author of Utopia Drive & Lost Mountain
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Dan Howell's collection of poems, Lost Country (Massachusetts), was the runner-up for the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America, and short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Other awards include a Writing Fellowship (Poetry) at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Tom McAfee Discovery Award (Missouri Review), and a citation for Notable Essay in Best American Essays 1993. A chapbook of poems, Whatever Light Used to Be (Workhorse), was published in 2018; Eden Incarnadine, a book-length poem, was published by Broadstone Books in 2019. MA, SUNY-Buffalo. MFA, UC-Irvine.
A&S department affiliation:
Book URL:
http://broadstonebooks.com/Dan_Howell.html