The love in this book is tangible and redemptive.-- "Minneapolis Star Tribune"

Her verse is almost unornamented though she manages some great gift of will and expression to convey the sharpest feeling in long, graceful lines that seem to breathe on the page.... Despite the fathomless pain inherent in these poems, Howe never succumbs to sentimentality or self-pity; her tone is passionate yet detached, her vocabulary and imagery evocative, appropriate, and devastating.-- "Memphis Commercial Appeal"

Howe is a truth-teller of the first order. Fearless in presenting unfiltered experiences, she interweaves her simple, economical language into long, subordinated sentences, loose, enjambed couplets that spill compellingly down the page with near-invisible artistry.-- "Providence Sunday Journal"

Marie Howe has reinvented the elegy as a poem for the living, a poem of instruction, how we're educated by grief. Scrupulously attentive, rigorously self-questioning, What the Living Do is an achievement of remarkable power.--Mark Doty

The tentative transformation of agonizing, slow-motion loss into redemption is Howe's signal achievement in this wrenching second collection, which uncovers new potential for the personal poem.-- "Publishers Weekly, starred review"