Book of Beginnings and Ends focuses on the continuing dance between initial and terminal experiences, effects, and conditions. The poems in the book's four sections come in a wide variety of tones and emotional postures, from hilarity to deep grief, in their quest for balance, some means of containing and celebrating both extremes. The the poems propose, in fact, that, along with a persistent kindness, achieving and celebrating such balance is life's essential work. This new volume takes on its subject matter with the lyric imagination, tenderness, clarity and force readers of Howell's writing have come to expect.