Zero at the Bone

Starred review from October 2, 2023
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.

Starred review from November 1, 2023
Poet and memoirist Wiman (Survival Is a Style, 2020) offers an assemblage of reflections, recollections, inquiries, spiritual reckonings, poems, and close readings to create "a book true to the storm of forms and needs, the intuitions and impossibilities, that I feel myself to be. That I feel life to be." He listens attentively to his young daughters, shifts through memories of his West Texas boyhood, and wrestles with faith as he teaches in the Yale Divinity School, which, he bluntly states, would not have accepted him as a student. Wiman's erudition and wisdom are hard-won. He summons Shakespeare, George Herbert, Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more as elders and polestars. His literary immersions alternate with soundings in scripture and science. Wiman writes of his long battle with a rare blood cancer, of chemo and opiates, "rapture" and "rupture." He questions our treatment of animals; he tells wild true tales about his father and sister that feel like Barry Hannah stories. His new poems are lancing and funny. The shift in forms and tone throughout this incandescent mosaic keeps the reader alert and curious; each piece is an adventure, provocation, meditation, lesson, or attempted proof. A passionate literary religious thinker in the mode of Marilynne Robinson, Wiman is magnetizing and revelatory.

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