Former New York poet laureate **Marie Howe** reads from her poetry collections and speaks about the role of spirituality and imagination in her work. An acclaimed poet, Howe is the author of three poetry collections: _The Good Thief_ (1988), _What the Living Do_ (1997), and _The Kingdom of Ordinary Time_ (2008). Howe's work deals with themes of faith, loss, and family: the secular and the sacred, childhood and living. She grew up in a Catholic family, the eldest of nine children, and has said that the nuns who provided her education also shaped her theology: "I began to appreciate that spirituality could be rigorous. It could be imaginative." In _What the Living Do_, she faces the death of her brother from AIDS and writes about his loss with what the Boston Globe has described as "a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation." (Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York (Poetry in Motion: The Poet is In) [[CC by 2.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 "CC")], via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poetry_in_Motion-_The_Poet_is_In_(17060822750).jpg "Marie Howe poet is in"), image cropped)
