slakeless

Political alarm has her "looking down on Utah as if / It was Saudi Arabia or Pakistan." (41) The same alarm plus a slakeless thirst for the sacred leads her to the following equivocal image of the east: "All of us seem to be transfixed / stacked as we are facing east / week after week a little like / one of the ones who were invited to life." (42) Through many volumes, Howe has displayed a will to be slashing, abrupt, alienated, unforgiving, furiously fast, too leathery for pathos--in short, truly contemporary.