“A Survival Manual”: 10 Years of RENDER / AN APOCALYPSE

Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse was received in 2013 with a stunning range of reviews and engagement. Excerpts and links appear below. We share these to celebrate both the power of this book and the generous, necessary work of readers, critics, and little magazines, who help urgent books take root in the culture, flourish, and do their work.

Why should you read this book? Because it is necessary, so necessary that you should keep it in your tool box along with the hammer and the box of nails. —Rebecca Dundon, New Madrid

Howell’s poems are everything I crave in poetry—direct, hard poems that knock the reader in the teeth yet twist with the elegance of a swinging hatchet blade —Julia Bouwsma, Connotation Press 

[Render / An Apocalypse] reminds me of a survival manual. Or a religious tract. Or both. —The Scrapper Poet 

This is the book you want with you in the cellar when the tornado is upstairs taking your house and your farm. It's the book you want in the bomb shelter, and in the stalled car, in the kitchen waiting for the kids to come home, in the library when the library books are burned. Its instructions are clear and urgent. Rebecca Gayle Howell has pressed her face to the face of the actual animal world. She remembers everything we have forgotten. Read this! It's not too late. We can start over from right here and right now. —Marie Howe

Our current moment of near-total disassociation from the sources of the food we eat requires equipment for re-engagement: to shatter the pastoral fantasy being marketed by industrial agriculture multinationals that bears so little resemblance to actual production methods. The apocalypse, in at least one sense, is upon us. Howell’s poems render our awareness with humor, urgency, and courage. —Sean Pears, Denver Quarterly

Explicitly, these poems charge us to observe the natural world, but implicitly, they urge us to question our perceptual structures, deconstructing the power hierarchies we impose and dispelling the infallibility of the systems we use to organize our understanding of it. —John James, The Kenyon Review

Howell has given the literary world a truly unique offering, which finds the common ground between poetry, horror, and (human) nature. —Michael Schmeltzer, CutBank

The poems in Render see the world sharply. —Emily May Anderson, New Pages

Though Render/ An Apocalypse is no light verse, it is peculiar and inventive. Howell successfully crafts a raw experience that lets us savor the conflicting instances of tenderness and brutality between humans and animals in new and exciting ways. —Erica Kenick, Gulf Stream Magazine

[Render] intrigues me and makes me ache all at once. —Savannah Sipple, Structure and Style

The collection is a stirring almanac of the macabre and the hard-wrought.—Roberto Carlos Garcia, The Rumpus 

[Render] alerts us to one possible atavistic role to which poetry may yet be restored, the passing-down of communal knowledge and expertise... The poems do not assume that role simply or straightforwardly (there is a lot going on in any one of the poems), but the relationship to that role makes for a viscerality to the poems that lends them force.... —H.L. Hix, In Quire 

These poems are fiercely intelligent. —Frederick Smock, The Courier-Journal

Howell has written a book of urgency and tenderness, worry and wisdom. Without a trace of irony, she uses imagery rooted in the past to speak to the present. The result is a chilling, beautiful, and necessary collection. The poems in Render / An Apocalypse will stay with you long after you close the book. —Chloe Honum, On the Seawall 

Howell details the hell we must live through and the attention to suffering required of us. —Sean Patrick Hill, LEO Weekly 

In Render, Howell stirs the pot and stokes the fire. Atonement and clarity come hand in hand. —Jeremy Dae Paden, The Hillville

To enter into these poems one must be fully committed, as the poet is, to seeing this world as it is, to staying with it, moment by moment, day by day. Yet these poems hold a dark promise: this is how you can do it, but you must be fully engaged, which means you must be fully awake, you must wake up inside it. As we proceed, the how-to of the beginning poems subtly transforms, as the animals (or, more specifically, the livestock) we are engaging begin to, more and more, become part of us, literally and figuratively—we enter inside of that which we devour. —Nick Flynn, from the foreword

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. I did not realize while reading Render how deeply I was handing everything over. —Nikky Finney

Rebecca Gayle Howell has written a frightening, truth-telling book. Sparse and necessary, her voice has the southern bite of Flannery O'Connor. She erases the lines between butchering, cruelty to animals, subsistence living, and the underbelly of wildness and love that is murdered in all of us. Howell's words will haunt: "This is how we are civilized." —Anne Marie Macari

Stark and unembellished, the poems in Render have the effect of looking at a rusted hatchet buried in a stump. We are presented a world driven by action and instinct, our hands in death at every turn. Is this the world we're moving toward? Or, is this the world we've lived in from the start? Rebecca Gayle Howell has written a subtle and sobering book, a collection of poems cut with cold precision. —Maurice Manning