Christian Wiman
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Summary
Survival Is a Style, Christian Wiman's first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet.
His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet's father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and...
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Every Riven Thing is Christian Wiman's first collection in seven years, and rarely has a book of poetry so borne the stamp of necessity. Whether in stark, haiku-like descriptions of a cancer ward, surrealistic depictions of a social order coming apart, or fluent, defiant outpourings of praise, Wiman pushes his language and forms until they break open, revealing startling new truths within. The poems are joyful and sorrowful at the same time, abrasive...
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"Few contemporary writers ask the questions about faith, morality, and God that Christian Wiman does, and even fewer--perhaps none--do so with his urgency and eloquence. Wiman, an award-winning poet and the author of My Bright Abyss, lays the motion of his mind on the page in this genre-defying work, an indivisible blend of poetry, criticism, theology, and searing memoir. As Marilynne Robinson wrote, "[Wiman's] poetry and his scholarship have a purifying...
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Seven years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith-responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition-might look like.
Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully...
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"Blazing high style" is how The New York Times describes the prose of Christian Wiman, the young editor transforming Poetry, the country's oldest literary magazine. Ambition and Survival is a collection of stirring personal essays and critical prose on a wide range of subjects: reading Milton in Guatemala, recalling violent episodes of his youth, and traveling in Africa with his eccentric father, as well as a series of penetrating essays on writers...
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A searing new collection from one of our country's most important poets
Memories mercies
mostly aren't
but there were
I swear
days
veined with grace
-from "Memory's Mercies"
Once in the West, Christian Wiman's fourth collection, is as intense and intimate as poetry gets-from the "suffering of primal silence" that it plumbs to the "rockshriek of joy" that it achieves and enables. Readers of Wiman's earlier books will recognize the sharp characterizations...
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"Synthesizing Gravity gathers for the first time a thirty-year selection of Kay Ryan's probings into aesthetics, poetics, and the mind in pursuit of art. A bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private, previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets-including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson-Synthesizing Gravity bristles with Ryan's crisp wit, her keen off-kilter insights, and...