Susan Howe’s The Midnight is a rather unconventional collection of prose and poetry that appears to lack a clear focus and may be a challenge for a reader not used to Howe’s particular style.

The Midnight presents to the reader an eclectic mix of topics ranging from insomnia to musings on the author’s Irish heritage. In alternating prose/poetry sections Howe relates little factoids and anecdotes that eventually converge at an “ah-ha” moment for the reader (every reader’s will most likely be different).

The best grasp at an overarching theme present in The Midnight would be connections. Throughout the book, Howe is constantly making connections: connections from herself to her family’s heritage, Shakespeare’s Macbeth to her bouts with insomnia, connections between the concepts of textiles and text. In fact, the entire work becomes a sort of textile with each fact and story woven into the whole of the book.

The material is varied and each form has its own indelible style. Howe’s poetry looks as if it is a conglomerate of words smashed into a square cookie-cutter; each poem is almost perfectly justified into the same square dimensions. It became noticeable when the pages of the book were glued and cut at a different height because of the similarities between every page of poetry.

As far as the language of the poetry, it is abstract, at best. It borders on incomprehensible were it not for the fact that many of Howe’s central themes are included in the poems.

The prose of the book is interspersed with various photographs and illustrations, for one of Howe’s objectives of the book is to present the relationship of text and the image it represents. The subject matter—as mentioned earlier—is varied. One of the book’s sections will bring you through such diverse subjects as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet;” biographical notes on Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect behind New York’s Central Park.

It’s hard to pinpoint whether or not Howe is accomplishing what she has set out to do since it’s hard to describe what exactly she’s doing in her book, The Midnight. It’s easy to pick out central themes but to connect them all becomes somewhat tedious. This is why it becomes necessary for the reader to step back and take in Howe’s work from afar.

Thinking logically about this book does not work because it goes against most conventions one comes to expect from a work of literature. The reader has to, instead, look at The Midnight from the perspective of what he or she can get out of the work. In other words, take one of the main themes and use that to explore the work.

The Midnight is a highly challenging and versatile work. It pushes boundaries in what readers expect from a work and also what they take away from it. Versatility, though, is the main attribute of the work; the book can be just about anything the reader wants it to be, he or she just has to look for it.