Savage Conversations

“Howe’s drama taps emotional undercurrents that course imperceptibly through conventional historical narratives.” —Publishers Weekly “In May of 1875, Mary Todd Lincoln is confined to an insane asylum. There, she is haunted by a ‘Savage Indian’ who scalps her nightly and sews her eyes open. In Howe's telling, the specter haunting the widowed First Lady is one of the thirty eight Dakota men, hanged in 1862 by her husband in the largest mass execution in American history. In reading this, I was blown away. Unmoored. Sent spiraling adrift on gusts of wind.” —Rachel S, Harvard Book Store “Part fever dream, part extended meditation on madness, Howe’s Savage Conversations is a bracing commentary on the nature of guilt and grief.” —Historical Novel Society “Savage Conversations takes place somewhere in between its sources, between sanity and madness, between then and now, between the living and the dead. It pushes past the limitations of textual sources for telling indigenous history and accounts of insanity.” —Barrelhouse Reviews “An eerie mash-up that ties President Lincoln’s mass 1862 execution of 38 Dakota warriors to the hallucinations of Mary Todd Lincoln.” —City Pulse “LeAnne Howe’s words are to savor, contemplate, and horrify. Savage Conversations explodes with the stench of guilt and insanity that undergirds the American story, whispered through a personal, familial, national, and supernatural drama revelatory in every sense. Howe’s uncanny images will long haunt readers, just as the Dakota 38 linger in land and memory, both offering a testament to the violent entanglements of past and present.” —Philip J. Deloria “LeAnne Howe’s play Savage Conversations activates this space in history. She fills the wide-open gaps with a narrative of ‘what could have been,’ makes the absences present in very intimate ways.” —Full Stop “Savage Conversations invokes our own racial conflict and probes America’s psyche, its struggle to reconcile its colonialist values, indeed its white supremacy, with its multi-ethnic cultures and populations. . . . Through the masterly dramatic management of Mrs. Lincoln’s disturbing and chilling obsessions, Howe shows that there is no escape from the yesterday’s paradigms of power without a true reckoning with the injustices that set the stage for our troubled social landscape.” —On the Seawall “Howe’s book powerfully contributes to our understanding and re-thinking of a moment in time that we are still grappling with today. In the wake of recent movements to remove Confederate monuments as we work to present the truths of history, Howe’s book directs our attention to a violent event that has not been adequately acknowledged. Through experimental form, Howe refracts a moment of history that readers simply cannot forget, that they will inevitably carry with them long after reading the last page.” —The Carolina Quarterly “This is a haunted poem. Howe gives us voices intimate, twisted, and deluded—and yet relentlessly exact. Inside this drama in verse, a seething history uncoils. But do we meet a mad woman’s fantasy or someone more real?” —Heid Erdrich  Praise for LeAnne Howe “Let her lead you into history, intrigue, comedy and comic insight, even mystery, yes, as she impels you and other readers toward decolonization with attitude! A very fine and fulfilling read.” —Simon J. Ortiz “How does she do it? Cross Rocky Horror Picture Show with War and Peace in a voice that sings America’s song as deeply as the best musical poetry of Walt Whitman? But no, Howe’s voice is so utterly unique, comparisons can’t do her justice.” —Susan Power