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Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair
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About This Book
Christian Wiman braids poetry, memoir, and criticism to create an inspired, career-defining work. 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.
Reviews
"They exceed every expectation, offering light and sound and silence ..."
"It's a gorgeous ode to the power of poetry to grapple with life's most anguished moments."
"Like one of those fancy juice cleanses of recent yore, intellectual edition: full of salubrious and often quite tough poetry, philosophy and theology broken down into digestible bits ..."
"Ultimately much of this book forms a kind of sermon, often leaning on platitudes and moments of droll self-regard ..."
"Wiman quotes from, and thinks with, old standbys on the subject, like Simone Weil and George Herbert, and more surprising choices, like William Bronk and Gwendolyn Brooks."
"A passionate literary religious thinker in the mode of Marilynne Robinson, Wiman is magnetizing and revelatory."
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