Novelist and poet Fanny Howe is noted for an increasingly avant-garde literary output. Beginning her career in print with mainstream New York City publishers, Howe's work has become increasingly less commercial, with much of her more recent output available only through smaller presses. Howe has been grouped since the late 1970s with so-called "language poets," such as Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, and others. Her well-known long poem The Lives of a Spirit is reminiscent of the work of poet Rainer Maria Rilke and in the poem "the openness of the text, the sometimes dizzying abysses between the sentences, invite the reader to embark on a spiritual pilgrimage parallel to the author's," according to Contemporary Women Poets contributor Burton Hatlen.

Forty Whacks, Howe's first book, is considered among her more popular mainstream early work. A volume of prose published in 1969, it contains six short stories dealing with troubled women. Some of the protagonists are murderers, others adulteresses, but as M. Ann Petrie pointed out in a New Leader review, "all are out of touch with themselves and the world—and they are lonely." The protagonists of the short stories "Forty Whacks" and "The Other Side of Lethe" provide evidence of Petrie's observations. The main character of the title story reveals her detachment as she describes in her diary, in the cool language of psychoanalysis, her deliberate destruction of a couple's marriage. She rationalizes her actions, in an account Nation reviewer Shaun O'Connell judged "as tightly told as [Robert] Browning's dramatic monologues," and when she has achieved her goal, she decides she doesn't want the husband after all. Instead of being the "severely alive" person she believes she is, "she proves to be a very dead young woman," assessed Petrie. The heroine of "The Other Side of Lethe" is a woman left dispassionate by amnesia. Because she has forgotten the details of the death of her lover, whom she was convicted of murdering, she is unaffected by them. She relates the events, described O'Connell, "as though she were arranging flowers."

After Howe's marriage to fellow writer Carl Senna in 1968, her work became increasingly "eccentric," as Howe once noted to Contemporary Authors. Through her multi-racial marriage now exposed to a culture different from the white, middle-class milieu of her youth, Howe continued to write fiction and poetry but found that "some world view was inexorably shifting in me, and I felt sidelined by conversations and remarks that would have slid by unnoticed before." The period between 1968 and 1988 was a fertile period for Howe as an author—she published thirteen novels and seven collections of poetry during this period—but socially her life became more domestic.

Other works by Howe include the 1992 novel Saving History and One Crossed Out, the latter a collection of poetry published in 1997. Poetry and prose have merged increasingly throughout Howe's more recent oeuvre, and Saving History exemplifies this merger. A long narrative work, it is broken by passages of verse. The novel focuses on a homeless woman, Felicity Dumas, and her involvement in the black market—as well as with one of its smugglers—after she learns her daughter needs a new liver. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called Saving History "a taut, lyrical tale that demands careful reading," noting Howe's writing as being part of "the experimental, postmodernist tradition." The reviewer added that the novel is "a tale of magic realism perfectly set in its Mexico/California landscape." According to Dennis Barone in Review of Contemporary Fiction, "The 'saving' of Saving History means redemption: who shall be saved and how shall they be redeemed?" Barone maintained that "the novel should appeal to many readers," and called the work "very special and unusual." In American Book Review, Santiago Colas stated: "The back cover of . . . Saving History characterizes it as a 'brilliant contemporary social novel.' I certainly feel compelled to agree. But I also feel that such a characterization somehow is inadequate to express the inestimable importance of this novel, which is nonetheless . . . 'brilliant', 'contemporary', and 'social'. I think the problem is with the word 'social' and with the alternatively abstract or narrowly topical associations that attach themselves to that word. . . . By reinventing the social novel from the ground up, Saving History has addressed this problem, and others, in a very provocative, engaging, and moving way."

In the twenty poems comprising One Crossed Out, Howe's poetry too is experimental. Characterized as "inventive" and "consistently surprising," her verses challenge the commonly held conventions of both "lyric and narrative through an idiosyncratic . . . understanding of how language inhabits things," in the words of Library Journal contributor Fred Muratori. Told from the viewpoint of May, a homeless woman with a drug problem, the poems in One Crossed Out were cited by a Publishers Weekly critic as an "acquired taste." But, noted the critic, the work "can also reveal how a language of brutalized distress can be unexpectedly beautiful." As Howe herself explained in Contemporary Women Poets, "my poetry has continued to work as a response to the daily world and how strange it is in every aspect."

Nod, a novel published by Howe in 1997, is a "dark fable in prose, verse and pictures," according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. The tale, set in Ireland just before the start of World War II, is about the troubles of an American family. The same reviewer commented that the growing friction between the two sisters of the family—Irene, the favored of their parents, and Cloda—appears to parallel the conflicts of the twentieth century. In Review of Contemporary Fiction, Brian Lennon commented of Nod: "The principal movements of the novel occur on seemingly 'universal' planes—those of family life and its frequently repressive effects on adult social identity." "Language, not plot, propels this book by way of metaphors, sensory images and lilting rhythms," noted the Publishers Weekly reviewer, who called Nod a "virtuosic book."

Howe's 2000 collection, Selected Poems, combines 16 previously published serial poems on a variety of subjects, including her childhood, as in "The Sea Garden"; feminist thought, as in "The Vineyard"; and religion, as in "The Quietist." "Sensuous and intellectual pleasures commingle beautifully," a reviewer for Publishers Weekly maintained of the collection and went on to say: "Howe is here revealed to be working out a project of enormous consistence, clarity, and grace." Melanie Rehak of the New York Times noted: "stillness . . . tempers this volume." Rehak felt that this book, which covers a twenty-year span of Howe's work, contains "quiet, forceful poems." Selected Poems was awarded the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Howe's novel Indivisible also appeared in 2000. It explores the life of Henny, a filmmaker, who is married to a musician named McCool; the man is an alcoholic who is severely depressed. This childless couple lives in Boston, and Henny accepts foster children into their home. Indivisible describes not only the bonds between Henny, her husband and her "children," but also delves into the complexities of her long-time friendship with Libby, a wealthy young woman. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly stated that Indivisible "is sometimes confusing" but felt that in spite of that, "the strange logic of the novel hangs together."

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