What do the living do? They make breakfast, shovel snow, make love, bury the dead, suffer and survive and remember and speak.

Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach us how to be most alive. These poems touch the place where the inner life and the outer world meet: the moments when we realize that we are still living.

The Good Thief was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series.
-- "Marie Howe's poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life". -- Stanley Kunitz
-- "These poems are difficult to forget; poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots". -- Margaret Atwood