Eden Incarnadine, or The Authentic History of the Terrible Harpes ~ A True Story in Verse by Jeremiah Humm, American - A narrative poem by DAN HOWELL

Publication Date: February 15, 2019
Paperback, 56 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-51-9

Available from Small Press Distribution

Near the end of the 18th century, out on the far western frontier of Kentucky and Tennessee, the first serial killers in the history of the new American nation conducted a bloody reign of terror. Micajah and Wiley Harpe may have been brothers, or perhaps cousins, but they were unquestionably and particularly brutal murderers.

Now the tale of their exploits in all of its gruesomely accurate detail—not for the squeamish!—has been recounted in brilliant narrative poetry by Dan Howell, or rather by Howell's imaginary 19th century chronicler, Jeremiah Humm. Howell's achievement here is thus twofold, rendering the all too true story of these late 18th century monsters as it might be been recounted in the language and style of a 19th century author writing many decades later. The result is a poetic tour de force.

Praise for Dan Howell and Eden Incarnadine

“Dan Howell’s Eden Incarnadine, or The Authentic History of the Terrible Harpes is Poe’s American Gothic crossing the mountains into frontier Kentucky and set to verse, a narrative poem rooted in the history of Kentucky’s earliest serial killers, brothers Micajah and Wiley Harpe. Howell’s chilling excursion into a buckskin dystopia explores the dark careers of 'two of the more purely evil creatures ever to befoul this continent.' Howell unrelentingly and artfully brings it all alive.”

Richard Taylor, former Kentucky Poet Laureate & author of Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape

“Eden Incarnadine is a wildly inventive, gut-punch of a poem. I’ve never read anything quite like it. It is at once experimental and grounded in tradition. Howell inhabits an earlier American idiom and never hits a flat note. If Cormac McCarthy wrote poetry, it would sound like this.”

Erik Reece, author of Utopia Drive & Lost Mountain

Dan Howell’s kin came to Kentucky in 1784, before it became a state, settling in what was then Fayette County, Virginia. His collection of poems, Lost Country (Massachusetts), was the runner-up for the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America, and short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Other awards include a Writing Fellowship (Poetry) at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Tom McAfee Discovery Award (Missouri Review), and a citation for Notable Essay in Best American Essays 1993. A chapbook of poems, Whatever Light Used to Be (Workhorse) was published in 2018. Currently he lives and teaches in Lexington, Kentucky, back in his hometown after decades elsewhere.