A visionary selection from one of America's foremost poets One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American poetry, Christian Wiman has forged a singular style that fuses a vivid and propulsive music with clear-eyed realism, wry humor, and visionary lament. In his "daring and urgent" (The New York Times Book Review) memoir, My Bright Abyss, he asks, "What is poetry's role when the world is burning?" Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems might be read as an answer to that question. From the taut forms of his first book to the darker, more jagged fluencies of his second, into the bold and pathbreaking poems of his last two collections, Hammer Is the Prayer bears the reckless, restless interrogations and the slashing lyric intensity that distinguish Wiman's verse. But it also reveals the dramatic and narrative abilities for which he has been widely praised--the junkyard man in "Five Houses Down" with his "wonder-cluttered porch" and "the eyesore opulence / of his five partial cars," or the tragicomic character in "Being Serious" who suffers "the world's idiocy / like a saint its pains." Hammer Is the Prayer brings together three decades of Wiman's acclaimed poetry. Selected by the author, these poems reveal the singular music and metaphysical urgency that have attracted so many readers to his work and firmly assert his place as one of the most essential poets of our time.

Eight 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 written, "My Bright Abyss" is destined to become a spiritual classic, useful not only to believers but to anyone whose experience of life and art seems at times to overbrim its boundaries. How do we answer this "burn of being"? Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives--and for our deaths--if we acknowledge the "insistent, persistent ghost" that some of us call God?

One of "Publishers Weekly"'s Best Religion Books of 2013

Whose lives count as fully human? The answer matters for everyone, disabled or not. The ancient Greek ideal linked physical wholeness to moral wholeness - the virtuous citizen was "beautiful and good." It's an ideal that has all too often turned deadly, casting those who do not measure up as less than human. In the pre-Christian era, infants with disabilities were left on the rocks; in modern times, they have been targeted by eugenics. Much has changed, thanks to the tenacious advocacy of the disability rights movement. Yesteryear's hellish institutions have given way to customized educational programs and assisted living centers. Public spaces have been reconfigured to improve access. Therapies and medical technology have advanced rapidly in sophistication and effectiveness. Protections for people with disabilities have been enshrined in many countries' antidiscrimination laws. But these victories, impressive as they are, mask other realities that collide awkwardly with society's avowals of equality. Why are parents choosing to abort a baby likely to have a disability? Why does Belgian law allow for euthanasia in cases of disability, even absent a terminal diagnosis or physical pain? Why, when ventilators were in short supply during the first Covid wave, did some states list disability as a reason to deny care? On this theme: - Heonju Lee tells how his son with Down syndrome saved another child's life. - Molly McCully Brown and Victoria Reynolds Farmer recount their personal experiences with disability. - Amy Julia Becker says meritocracies fail because they value the wrong things. - Maureen Swinger asks six mothers around the world about raising a child with disabilities. - Joe Keiderling documents the unfinished struggle for disability rights. - Isaac T. Soon wonders if Saint Paul's "thorn in the flesh" was a disability. - Leah Libresco Sargeant reviews What Can a Body Do? and Making Disability Modern. - Sarah C. Williams says testing for fetal abnormalities is not a neutral practice. Also in the issue: - Ross Douthat is brought low by intractable Lyme disease. - Edwidge Danticat flees an active shooter in a packed mall. - Eugene Vodolazkin finds comic relief at funerals, including his own father's. - Kelsey Osgood discovers that being an Orthodox Jew is strange, even in Brooklyn. - Christian Wiman pens three new poems. - Susannah Black profiles Flannery O'Conner. - Our writers review Eyal Press's Dirty Work, Steve Coll's Directorate S, and Millennial Nuns by the Daughters of Saint Paul. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

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 on the mantle of our greatest mystics and does so with an honest, profound, and contemporary sensibility. Zero at the Bone is a revelation.

When we read the book of nature, what do we read there? "All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all," says a well-known hymn. This issue of Plough celebrates the creatures of our planet - plant, animal, and human - and the implications of humankind's relationship to nature. But if nature can be read as a book that reveals the wisdom of its Creator, it also reveals things less lovely than stars and singing birds - a world of desperate competition for survival, mass extinctions, and deadly viruses. Is such a world a convincing argument for the Creator's goodness? Turns out Christians and skeptics alike have been asking such questions since long before Darwin added a twist. Are we moderns out of practice at reading the book of nature? And if we forget how, will we fail to read human nature as well - what rights or purposes our Creator may have endowed us with? What then is there to limit the bounds of technological manipulation of humankind? This issue of Plough explores these and other fascinating questions about the natural world and our place in it. In this issue: - Sussex farmer Adam Nicholson evokes centuries of handwork that shaped the landscape of the Weald. - Gracy Olmstead revisits the land her forebears farmed in Idaho. - Ian Marcus Corbin tries walking phoneless to better note the beauty of the natural world. - Amish farmer John Kempf, a leader in regenerative agriculture, foresees a healthier future for farming. - Leah Libresco Sargeant offers a feminist critique of society's war on women's bodies. - Ivan Bernal Marin visits Panama City's traditional fishermen. - Maureen Swinger recalls to triumphs of second grade in forest school. - Edmund Waldstein questions head transplants and the limits of medical science. - Kelsey Osgood says it's natural to fear death, and to transcend that fear through faith. - Tim Maendel lifts the veil on urban beekeeping along the Manhattan skyline. You'll also find: - An essay by Christian Wiman on the poetry of doubt and faith - New poems by Alfred Nicol - A profile of Amazon activist nun Dorothy Stang - An appreciation of Keith Green's songs - Insights on creation from Blaise Pascal, Julian of Norwich, Francis of Assisi, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Christopher Smart, Augustine of Hippo, The Book of Job, and Sadhu Sundar Singh - Reviews of The Opening of the American Mind, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus' message into practice and find common cause with others.

Named as a 2020 Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement 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 juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary. Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

To celebrate the centennial of Poetry, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman combed the magazine's vast archives to create a new kind of anthology, energized by a self-imposed limitation to one hundred poems. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive - or even to offer the most familiar works - they have assembled a collection of poems that, in their juxtapositions, echo across a century of poetry. The result is an anthology like no other, a celebration of idiosyncrasy and invention, a vital monument to an institution that refuses to be static, and most of all, a book that lovers of poetry will devour, debate, and keep close at hand.

Evocative poems and prose fragments about home, selected by one of the most celebrated poets of our time "This is a book of longing, yes, and also spiritual discernment, political awareness, historical memory, and deep intimacy."-Carolyn Forche In this poignant collection, Christian Wiman draws together one hundred evocative poems and prose fragments about home, exploring home's deep theological, literary, philosophical, historical, political, and social dimensions. Wiman calls home "a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god." It's "a word that disperses into more definitions than one book can contain." The tensions between diffusion and concentration, roaming and rootedness, precarity and security are everywhere in this book, often in the same poem. Ranging from early modernism to the current moment, and from southern Africa to the Arctic Circle, the selections are as diverse as the poets included. Collectively they envision an imaginative home for even the most homeless of modern readers. Completed entirely during quarantine, amid the miseries of separation and isolation, the collection offers a powerful vision of home as both a place and a way.

Make no mistake: Christian Wiman's poetic endeavors are ambitious. From the personal lyrics of solitude and loss to "Being Serious," the long poem that concludes "Hard Night," his poems examine emotions clearly, without sentimentality. A profound reverence for form and passion for poetry are evident in these artfully shaped poems that contain and find meaning in the unwieldy and inexplicable. Just as he is doing as the new editor of "Poetry," Wiman makes intellectually and emotionally engaged writing accessible to an expanding audience of readers.

Christian Wiman is the author of two books and a widely published essayist and critic. He lives in Chicago, where he is editor of "Poetry" magazine.

Poetry. Christian Wiman is perhaps best known as the editor of Poetry, but THE LONG HOME won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Price and is responsible for putting Wiman on the literary map. Reissued to coincide with the publication of AMBITION AND SURVIVAL: BECOMING A POET, this stunning collection confirms Wiman's status as one of the most remarkable poets of his generation. "Joseph Campbell once said that what we seek is not the meaning of life but the feeling of being alive, the experience of the living moment. In page after page of THE LONG HOME, Wiman renders such moments"--The Sewanee Review.

A vibrant new collection from one of America's most talented young poets

"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 and beautiful, densely physical and credibly mystical. They attest to the human hunger to feel existence, even at its most harrowing, and the power of art to make our most intense experiences not only apprehensible but transfiguring.

One hundred of the most evocative modern poems on joy, selected by an award-winning contemporary poet "Bursting with energy and surprising locutions. . . . Even the most familiar poets seem somehow new within the context of Joy."-David Skeel, Wall Street Journal "Wiman takes readers through the ostensible ordinariness of life and reveals the extraordinary."-Adrianna Smith, The Atlantic Christian Wiman, a poet known for his meditations on mortality, has long been fascinated by joy and by its relative absence in modern literature. Why is joy so resistant to language? How has it become so suspect in our times? Manipulated by advertisers, religious leaders, and politicians, joy can seem disquieting, even offensive. How does one speak of joy amid such ubiquitous injustice and suffering in the world? In this revelatory anthology, Wiman takes readers on a profound and surprising journey through some of the most underexplored terrain in contemporary life. Rather than define joy for readers, he wants them to experience it. Ranging from Emily Dickinson to Mahmoud Darwish and from Sylvia Plath to Wendell Berry, he brings together diverse and provocative works as a kind of counter to the old, modernist maxim "light writes white"-no agony, no art. His rich selections awaken us to the essential role joy plays in human life.

One hundred of the most evocative modern poems on joy, selected by an award-winning contemporary poet Christian Wiman, a poet known for his meditations on mortality, has long been fascinated by joy and by its relative absence in modern literature. Why is joy so resistant to language? How has it become so suspect in our times? Manipulated by advertisers, religious leaders, and politicians, joy can seem disquieting, even offensive. How does one speak of joy amid such ubiquitous injustice and suffering in the world? In this revelatory anthology, Wiman takes readers on a profound and surprising journey through some of the most underexplored terrain in contemporary life. Rather than define joy for readers, he wants them to experience it. Ranging from Emily Dickinson to Mahmoud Darwish and from Sylvia Plath to Wendell Berry, he brings together diverse and provocative works as a kind of counter to the old, modernist maxim "light writes white"-no agony, no art. His rich selections awaken us to the essential role joy plays in human life.