I left nothing inside on purpose

RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD WINNER

TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY FINALIST

PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD LONGLIST


“The sense that the world ought to be comprehensible cannot be overcome or out-thought, and so at the irreducible core of everything is a shard of betraying—there is, after all, no ought in nature. Again and again, the poems in Stevie Howell’s I left nothing inside on purpose attempt to provide that ought—’Yr mother worked for the doctor. She was also the doctor’—which is to say, I left nothing inside on purpose is a book of bewildered lament, as only the truest and smartest books are.” —Shane McCrae, author of In the Language of My Captor

“If you mend a broken bowl with a seam of gold then the fracture becomes more precious than the bowl itself. Stevie Howell’s poems are that sort of precious. Stevie’s voice is funny, in a dark, tragic, self-conscious sort of way. Restless, in a wise, far-reaching sort of way. Beautiful, in a broken sort of way. I return to them again and again.” —Nick Flynn, author of My Feelings 

“Stevie Howell’s poems create a dazzling sense of contemporary experience, with all its wounds, as well as the bruising quality of the past: an AI bot named Tay learns to be racist and sexist from ‘Talking w/ humans;’ Kintsugi pottery and fragments from Kierkegaard, D.H. Lawrence, and the vocabulary of self-help rattle through the deceptive transparency of Howell’s lines. The voice here insists on ironic distance and uncomfortable intimacy, poetic history and the banality of the present, ‘crowdfunded innocence’ and ‘how pain never knows when to stop.’ This collection is sophisticated, funny, and sad, often within the same line.” –Jury Citation, Raymond Souster Award

“Stevie Howell’s I left nothing inside on purpose is a tour-de-force with its own short-hand, its own formal ingenuity and its own off-kilter insights. The poems explore a range of topics, from a concussion-induced trip to a Hawaiian hospital, to the unlikely geological accident that results in the formation of malachite; from romantic strife to struggles with infertility and alcoholism, to the absurd phenomenon of being a human self in this strange multifarious world. Throughout, the poems are vulnerable, innovative, funny, and piercingly smart.” —Jury Citation, Trillium Book Award for Poetry