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 how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al. , Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form ... a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation" (Boston Globe).