“Rebecca Gayle Howell is an exceedingly generous workshop leader and compelling public speaker. We adored hosting Rebecca, as she went above and beyond to create a tight-knit community in her workshop and with her fellow faculty members. Her teaching style and creative work are top-notch!” — Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference, 2024

“In many cases, the speaker at such an event will read from their work, reply to a few questions, sign some books, and meet with their friends before returning home. But Professor Howell provided first an exceptional talk connecting her own writing with that of the conference’s namesake, then read movingly from her own work. Further, she entertained numerous questions, often engaging the speaker to discuss their own writing in a way that led one of the conference attendees to tell me, ‘She wanted dialogue.’ As if this were not enough, she spent another hour signing books and conversing with attendees. What’s more, the next morning she was on campus early to attend panel sessions and meet students with whom she had scheduled manuscript consultations. To say that I was surprised by all that she provided would be disingenuous, as I have known Professor Howell for over ten years and have never seen from her anything less than complete generosity of energy and spirit.” — University of Central Arkansas

“I always feel like Beall Poetry is sacred space — a time to stop the rushing of the world and listen to people who are thinking deeply about serious ideas and writing with the kind of beauty that can be solace. [Rebecca Gayle Howell was] such an integral part of creating that space this year with [her] wonderful reading and interactions with our students — thank you!” — Baylor University

“An amazing poet, inspiring activist, and an absolute joy to be around!” — Baylor University

“[Rebecca Gayle Howell] transformed our poetry time at the LGRWC into a spiritual journey — true, deep heart work. And in the process, [she] created such a sweet, supportive, bonded community. I am filled up and grateful.” — Poetry Workshop Attendee

“The workshops were instructive and memorable. [Rebecca Gayle Howell’s] face and body language, [her] tone of voice and words that are quotes to remember, [her] selection of the poems we read and discussed, [her] suggestions for poets and their work for our study and reflection, and [her] own reading offered me so much to go forward with. Renewed, inspired, and grateful.” — Poetry Workshop Attendee

“There’s an unexpected intimacy…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.” — The Los Angeles Times

“Every once in awhile, poetry needs to say to novels: I’ve been around longer, and I can tell stories better. Howell’s the kind of poet who can announce the apocalypse in a whisper.” — The Millions

“America has a rich literature of farm life, its pleasures, struggles and tragedies—most of it in the form of fiction, from Cather’s My Antonia to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Rural life has always inspired poetry as well, much of it romantic and sentimental, some of it striving for realism. Recent superb poets of farm life are Wendell Berry and Maxine Kumin. But there has never been anything as trenchant, as fierce, as Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse.” — Alicia Ostriker, Chancellor Emeritus of the American Academy of Poets

“What makes this collection deeply compelling is its unrelenting use of narrative to sustain a totalising image of a plausible American apocalypse, such that each prose poem becomes an indispensable thread in a collection which is biblical in its scope.” — Poetry London

“This crushing book of poems came into my life at just the right moment: in the middle of personal upheaval and just a couple of days before the election.” Burnaway: Art of the South, 2016 Book of the Year

“American Purgatory is, to my mind, not only one of the finest books of the year, but one of those books that will be remembered and read long after the winds have vaporized us all.” — St. Louis Magazine

“In every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel.” — Nikky Finney, National Book Award winner

“Rebecca Gayle Howell’s translation is stunning in how it creates a powerful, contemporary voice speaking to us directly with warmth and suffering, and yet also carries over the poems’ connection to Arabic literary traditions.” — Best Translated Book Awards, judge’s citation

“The best of poetry paired with the best of translations [achieves an] immediate bridge between cultures. It is a double gift.” — Hayden’s Ferry Review

“Taken together, these poems ask us to consider what work means to us, what work has done to us, how our bodies and minds have labored—for what, for whom? This anthology arrives in time to remind us, as Howell & Jones write, “Wealth does not have to be generated by suffering. It does not have to be this way.” — Scalawag Magazine

“I just left a union meeting in Franklin, Pennsylvania, where Ironworkers were thanking the rest of the labor movement for supporting them during a recent strike. At the core of solidarity is a mix of kindness and courage, rooted in shared vulnerability. And that’s exactly what I feel when I read What Things Cost. The stories, confessions, elegies, and authenticities in this book transcend generations and demographics, and feel just as familiar here in Franklin, Pennsylvania, as they will in every corner of every community where work happens.” — Stephen Cousins, National Field Director, AFL-CIO

“Poet and translator Rebecca Gayle Howell has transported Amal al-Jubouri’s moving cri de coeur across the precarious bridge between Arabic and English as well as the cultural, political, and ethical chasm separating Iraq and the United States. This is poetry necessary to our times, and we owe the makers of this work in English an enormous debt of gratitude.” — Carolyn Forché

“The best of poetry paired with the best of translations [achieves an] immediate bridge between cultures. It is a double gift.” — Hayden’s Ferry Review

“Howell, entrusting herself to al-Jubouri’s vision, has written beautiful, moving, and passionate poems in English that try to welcome the stranger among us, letting the one our nation has called enemy speak in our own tongue.” — Asymptote