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Zero at the bone : fifty entries against despair / Christian Wiman.

by Wiman, Christian, 1966- author.

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New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

9780374603458 (hardcover)

0374603456 (hardcover)

x, 306 pages ; 22 cm

Zero -- I will love you in the summertime -- The world sounds -- So trued to a roar -- A stronger name for life -- Can this sin live -- Issues of blood -- Particular flesh -- The man who planted peace -- The keep -- A prison gets to be a friend -- Professor of the practice of religion and literature -- Smart -- No epiphanies, please -- Kill the creature -- Ars poetica -- Faith comes through hearing -- Flashback -- So it be ours -- D., gardening -- Leopard breathes at last! -- The drift of the world -- Reading Pascal in quarantine -- How many days -- Drop a notch the sacred shield -- After the ballet -- A burning world -- I remember yesterday. The world was so young. -- The white buffalo -- How to live -- Bomb -- Remembering a city and a sickness -- Writing in the sand -- The uses of fiction -- I learn from her who learns from the air -- This I believe -- A sign in the void -- The rock and the rot -- Joy! Help! Joy! Help! -- The weakness meaning time -- Bone by bone -- Ifs eternally -- I sang pain -- A mammal's notebook -- I don't believe in the soul -- What the Western mystic -- My Christ -- Woman, with tomato -- The eft -- The cancer chair -- No omen but awe -- Zero.

"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 urgency that is rare in this world . . . It enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader's surprise and assent are one and the same." Zero at the Bone begins with Wiman's preoccupation with despair, and through fifty brief pieces, he unravels its seductive appeal. The book is studded with the poetry and prose of writers who inhabit Wiman's thoughts, and the voices of Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and others join his own. At its heart and Wiman's, however, are his family--his young children (who ask their own invaluable questions, like "Why are you a poet? I mean why?"), his wife, and those he grew up with in West Texas. Wiman is the rare thinker who takes up the mantle of our greatest mystics and does so with an honest, profound, and contemporary sensibility. Zero at the Bone is a revelation." -- Provided by publisher.

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