"An icon-smasher, but one who saves the pieces," Susan Howe, as The Multicultural Review remarked, "is one of America's most gifted poets of any formal persuasion." In The Midnight's five sections, three of poetry and two of prose amply illustrated with images Howe has collected, we find bed hangings, unfinished lace, ghosts, family photographs, whispers, interjections, the fly-leaves of old books, The Master of Ballantrae, the Yeats brothers, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Lady Macbeth, Thomas Sheridan, Mary Manning, Michael Drayton, Frederick Law Olmsted––a restless brood confronting, absorbing, and refracting history and language. With an inspired and inimitable verbal energy which takes on shades of wit, insomnia, and terror, The Midnight becomes a kind of dialogue in which the prose and poetry sections seem to be dreaming fitfully of each other.