“Oh my god, this is a perfect book.” These were the words I said to my friend as we were sitting in a common area, working and reading silently together in rare, quiet company. I’d just finished reading Sue Goyette’s Future Howl. It’s been about a month since then, and I have not changed my mind. Future Howl is everything we’re holding in: our personal trauma, nostalgia and recovery, bearing witness to global atrocity, and every wish for the good and decent.
From the first page, Future Howl disarms the reader of all expectations, whatever possible expectations one could have. A long poem split into two parts, “Private” and “Public,” the book features no conventional page numeration. Each page is instead marked by quarter-circles meant to evoke the fullness of the moon. If you peek at the “Notes” section, you’ll see that the formal page numbering is divided into this sequence: ), )), ()), (()), and New, with 10 New moons in each section. Each page also has 10 lines.
I’m giving away the game a bit. I didn’t know this was coming when I started reading it, and I think encountering this without knowing it’s happening is the best way to experience the book. It was about the time I got to Moon 6 of the “Private” section that I realized each page has 10 lines, prompting me to flip ahead to see where the first part ended. Sure enough, it was New Moon 10. It’s like zoning out on a beach in your own summer bliss with the tide in, only to come back to reality to see that the shore has extended several metres away.
These emergences and deferred arrivals are kinds of future howl, both the “Private” and “Public” parts crying in anticipation of what’s to come.
I actually started looking for things to be critical of at this point, counting the words in each line to see if there were 10. I said to my friend next to me as I started counting, “I’m going to fucking scream if there’s exactly 10 words in each line.” I somehow felt relieved to see that this was not the case. It’s not that I wanted Future Howl to be worse. I just wonder if I would ever read a work of poetry that hit me so hard.
But this poem is more than just good bones. Even before I fully clued-in to the structure, I saw what was going on with each New moon. In “Part One: Private,” each New moon ushers in some new emergence or arrival in the domestic life of a family:
At this point, the mother’s six-word memoir was:
swallowed moon, pushed out a daughter. (“Private,” Moon 1, New)
This is when “you” migrated, this is when “you” left the fuck
and the fuck grew a tail and became camouflaged. This is when you
stepped out of the boat onto the shore of me. (“Private,” Moon 3, New)
And the day carries on
with birdsong and sirens. The police came often, my father
and I still sometimes can’t answer the door. (“Private,” Moon 5, New)
In “Part 2: Public,” this arrival is constantly deferred. Each New moon signals not so much the emergence of a being but something that is both almost and already here, like seeing the eyes of the wolf in the woods lining up to take you out. This section outlines the anxieties bigger than all of us—the way we wrestle our conflicting perspectives in the face of seemingly irrefutable facts permeating our lives and attention in these dangerous times, “how intense everything is right now… every systemic thing smoking” (“Public,” Moon 7, (())):
Now there’s a moment, a portal, a gasp that must inevitably
be moved through. The wolf, just now, jumps corner screen
with a biteforce strong enough to snap a lock in two. (“Public,” Moon 2, New)
I’ve read how wolves lock eyes
with their prey before ringing the ancient agreement
between them. (“Public,” Moon 8, New)
These emergences and deferred arrivals are kinds of future howl, both the “Private” and “Public” parts crying in anticipation of what’s to come. Goyette has already proven herself adept at the long poem, especially with her work of inverted redaction Anthesis: A Memoir (Gaspereau Press, 2020). The beloved agave fruit from the Introduction to Anthesis even comes back for a brief cameo. But Future Howl presents a masterclass of the long poem as a work on relentless cusp—every page anticipating tomorrow, then tomorrow, then tomorrow.
Sue Goyette was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec. When she was in high school, she loved the work of Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau. She has won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the Earle Birney Prize, and the Bliss Carman Award. Her fourth book, Ocean, was shortlisted for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize. She teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University and works part-time at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.
Publisher: Gaspereau Press (May 1, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″ | N/A pp
ISBN: 9781554472796
Jamie Kitts (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik People. She is the author of the chapbook Girl Dinner (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2024) and a co-author of All Things to Keep You Here (with Egg Poets, Qwerty Homerow, 2023). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Malahat Review, Augur, new words, Plenitude, Yolk, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor and Homerow Chapbook Series Editor of Qwerty Magazine, and she is also the Editor-in-Chief of Gridlock Lit. Author photo by Jessica Webber
