Zero at the Bone
Fifty Entries Against Despair
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and translator Wiman (My Bright Abyss) weaves together poetry, essay, and memoir in this dazzling, multivocal examination of and refusal to accept existential despair. It's a subject with which the author is familiar: his West Texas childhood was wracked by violence and drug addiction (his sister's and father's); later came persistent doubts and ambivalence about the Christianity he'd grown up in. The entries wrestle with God and the challenges of belief; with art and its limits; with suffering and the urgency of human needs and desires. A prodigious reader, Wiman mines scripture ("And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And/ I answere, O Lord God, thou knowest," from Ezekiel) and the work of such poets as Emily Dickinson, from whom he takes the title image, and William Bronk ("Again and again," Wiman writes, "Bronk finds (and suffers) the limit of what the human mind can know"). Wiman's knowledge is vast, and his evocative imagery lingers in the mind: "Some people read the stars, some people read people,/ some sit in a vise of silence trawling God./ Love and death, love and death, red shift, blue shift." It's a gorgeous ode to the power of poetry to grapple with life's most anguished moments.
