Every Riven Thing: Poems

by Christian Wiman

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.

Genres: Poetry, Religion, Spirituality, Fiction, Christianity, Meditation, Faith

113 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 9, 2010

About the author

Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in West Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003 he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry.

Reviews

[Jesse Broussard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

Cautions first: some language. Basically, here's a litmus test: if you can spend ten minutes in a store decorated by Thomas Kinkade without wanting to put a chair or small person through a wall, you may not like this book. If you can have a sober, intelligent conversation with a man about his imminent death and remain unaffected by it, you will be unimpressed. If you use the English language to convey points the way the federal government uses money to fix the public school system (just use more until something gets better) then this book will downright annoy you. But if you don't fit these categories then this book may well level you like Hiroshima. It's hard to maintain cotton-candy illusions about the world in the face of a reality so stark as terminal cancer. It's hard to see any real beauty if you keep your eyes shut for fear of catching a glimpse of something that isn't beautiful. This book, to steal from N. D. Wilson and Jeffers, is beautiful as a forest in flame, the sky merciless blue and the earth merciless black. And there's nowhere to hide.

But Christian Wiman's main topic is not death. It's rarely even mentioned. No, his topic is life, and its wonder, life, and its absurdities, life, and its approaching end. The book is full of lines such as the following:



I loved his ten demented chickens
and the hell-eyed dog, the mailbox
shaped like a huge green gun.
I loved the eyesore opulence
of his five partial cars...

(which is in my opinion one of the best opening lines ever written for a poem)

And the engine-eyed atheists screaming reason

It should, while evoking eternity, cry time,
like a priest at meat.

his antic frantic penny-ante-Ahab stabs of madness

two cloudminded miles over Iowa

and made of the air an unguent made of them

A shadow on the water soft as thought

rock's archaic ache

an inchoate incarnate thought

Welcome to the hell of having everything.



and so, so many others. And these are biopsies, snippets extracted to be studied, not the overarching bodies (how unmodern a poet, to write poems about things). This is a man who writes, not like Dumas, not like Chesterton, birthing brilliance and trusting it to raise itself, nor like Lewis, ever forgetful of the words he had written. This is a man that writes with the desperation born out of a dying desire to leave one lasting impression on this earth beyond his tomb, a man that writes as if far more than merely his life were resting on his words, a man who bestows upon every ink-splash on the page more tumultuous meaning than most poets could wrestingly extract from their own lives. Facing death. To illustrate, I'll leave you with two final quotes, one of them a complete poem.


2047 Grace Street
(excerpt)

I do not know how to come closer to God
except by standing where a world is ending
for one man. It is still dark,
and for an hour I have listened
to the breathing of the woman I love
beyond my ability to love. Praise to the pain
scalding us toward each other, the grief
beyond which, please God, she will live
and thrive. And praise to the light that is not
yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,
crying not as if there had been no night,
but as if there were no night in which it had not been.



The Mind of Dying
(entire)

God, let me give you now this mind of dying
fevering me back
into consciousness of all I lack
and of that consciousness becoming proud.

There are keener griefs than God.
They come quietly, and in plain daylight,
leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.

My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language
to a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish
more than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.

[Annalise Kraines · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the majority of these out loud to myself, and every word sounded good coming out of my mouth. 10/10 would recommend.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got Every Riven Thing: Poems along with three other slim poetry volumes from Farrar, Strauss from a newspaper colleague of mine who had no intention of reviewing them. I read two others first, and didn’t like them much at all, so I put this aside and it’s only an accident I ever picked it up again, especially with such a foreboding cover. But it is great poetry. I loved it. Beautiful words, beautiful syntax, and also solemn and serious, even though the rhyme and rhythm make it playful at times. He chosen theme is often death but there’s plenty of other stuff – characters, phenomenon, nature, love.

It seems Wiman wrote these poems in response to being diagnosed with some illness. I don't actually know what illness nor do I care, but just for background that does seem important to understanding where the poems come from.

He often employs end and internal rhyme, which I mostly liked. Here the first lines of “From a Window.” It’s not one of my favorites, but still, here goes.

Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close …

Many of the poems have to do with God and belief and I don’t believe in God but that didn’t keep me from enjoying them and wishing that were a real consolation, even though in “Hammer is the Prayer,” Wiman claims that God is no consolation. Along with not believing in God, I don’t believe that God is no consolation, but hey! enough about me!

In additon to enjoying these poems I felt I could learn from them as a poet, how the lines broke, the rhymes, the small liberties.

My favorite poems include “Dipped Into Frenzy” and “Like a Dog Existence,” which are part of a sequence called “Not Altogether Gone,” which you can read here: http://chronicle.com/blogs/arts/monda...

I also liked “Dust Devil” and “To Grasp at the Mercury Minnows Are.” I couldn’t find those, though, so here are -

“Five Houses Down” from the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poet...

and “It Takes Particular Clicks” from Slate:
http://www.slate.com/id/2210851/

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

One Time
2. 2047 Grace Street

But the world is more often refuge
than evidence, comfort and covert
for the flinching will, rather than the sharp
particulate instants through which God's being burns
into ours. I say God and mean more
than the bright abyss that opens in that word.
I say world and mean less
than the abstract oblivion of atoms
out of which every intact thing emerges,
into which every intact thing finally goes.
I do not know how to come closer to God
except by standing where a world is ending
for one man. It is still dark,
and for an hour I have listened
to the breathing of the woman I love beyond
my ability to love. Praise to the pain
scalding us toward each other, the grief
beyond which, please God, she will live
and thrive. And praise to the light that is not
yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,
crying not as if there had been no night
but as if there was no night in which it had not been.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Earlier on, I was prepared to rate this higher. Some of the earlier poems just blew me away. But then I hit a patch of WTF poems that left me clueless ("Do You Remember the Rude Nudists"?). In particular, I had issues with "The Reservoir," which I read several times. It seems like it's meant to be a significant poem in the collection, but I just couldn't crack it. Part of this frustrated reading is on me, since I've just finished a stretch where I've had to read a lot of poetry for a poetry journal, which can reduce me to denseness when it comes poetry. In other words, this may not be a good time for me to read poetry since I'm kind of burned out and crave trashy stuff. Let me add that I love what Christian Wiman is doing with Poetry Magazine. So much so that I think Every Riven Thing requires me to revisit this book for another reading. Another star (or two) may be coming.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunner. Wiman's poetry reads almost like a masculine version of Emily Dickinson's, studded with rage and devastation and fierce will. His faith and his depth of seeing are complicated and bracing. And the world and Christianity both, it seems to me, are in dire need of so mature and apprehending a voice.

[Jenni Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Lord, suffer me to sing / these wounds by which I am made / and marred, savor this creature / whose aloneness you ease and are."

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christian Wiman is one of my favorite poets. Every riven thing he does is magic.

[Blondie the Librarian]

Rapturous and ecstatic. Grief, love, God, land, time, apocalypse, dementia, childhood. Read it!

Some of my current favorite excerpts:

“bright hives humming inside of us, in spite of us… / . . . up crawls / my cockroach hope, lone survivor of the fire I am.” (from “Darkcharms”)

“the sharp / particulate instants through which God’s being burns / into ours. I say God and mean more / than the bright abyss that opens in that word. / . . . Praise to the pain / scalding us toward each other, the grief / . . . And praise to the light that is not / yet, the dawn in which one bird believes, / crying not as if there had been no night / but as if there were no night in which it had not been.” (from “One Time: 2. 2047 Grace Street”)

“It made little sense to love, but love we did, / flinging ourselves out of ourselves like a river / striking rock / —suspended upended bits of light / grown gloriously plural—” (from “Voice of One Head”)

“I am the sound the sun would make / if the sun could make a sound / . . . For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things / and I will ride this tantrum back to God / until my fixed self, my fluorescent self / my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall self / withers in me like a salted slug” (from “And I Said to My Soul, Be Loud”)

“To love is to feel your death / given to you like a sentence, to meet the judge’s eyes / as if there were a judge, / as if he had eyes, / and love.” (from “Gone for the Day, She Is the Day”)

[Jared Kassebaum · Rating 5 out of 5]

The titular poem is just the tip of the iceberg in this collection of poetry by one of my newest favorite writers. If you've read Wiman's memoir/nonfiction works, you know even when he writes prose he can't help its poetic moments. His poetry dives into similar themes of the sufferings of his battle with cancer and faith in the midst of our suffering. There are many I go back to in this collection. My favorite idea is his description of God as the voice that we hear when we are shushed by the greatness of nature and then hear a voice asking in the midst of that awe, 'may I hold your hand?' God is that voice of intimacy we hear when we allow our attention to peacefully settle on direct experience.

[mary stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely lovely lovely. I took so long with this slim volume of poems because I kept rereading the poems over and over again (i tabbed my favorites in the library copy I had with sticky notes). As a person of faith, as well as as a poet, Christian Wiman sets a gold standard on how one can synthesize faith and poetry without it being ridiculously overt. I’m envious of his ability to do so, as a poet myself.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"How is it now, / like ruins unearthed by ruin, / my childhood should rise? / Lord, suffer me to sing / these wounds by which I am made / and marred, savor this creature / whose aloneness you ease and are" (82).

[Eliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always learn a great deal about the possibilities and reaches of language construction from Wiman, for which I am grateful.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be savored. My favorite is Every Riven Thing.

“God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made”.

[Mary Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorny and beautiful.

[Pragyan Pradhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When there is nothing left to curse
you can curse nothing
but when there is nothing left to love
the heart eats inward and inward its own need
for release..."

"O my life my war in a jar
I shake you and shake you
and may the best ant win"

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some questions for Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and author of the poetry book, Every Riven Thing (among others!)
(From Gapers Block: http://gapersblock.com/bookclub/2010/...)

GB: The definition of “riven” is “to wrench open,” “tear apart or to pieces,” or “to split with force.” Obviously, the book’s title, Every Riven Thing, could describe your diagnosis of an incurable cancer tearing apart your life, but after reading the poems, I also feel that the diagnosis might have split open your relationship with God or put a crack in some of the beliefs you previously held about God and religion. Is there any truth to this?

CW: It’s hard for me to remember which poems were written when. There are poems in this book that are fifteen years old, and others that were written right before the book came out.
I think you’re right, though, to notice the radical mix of tones in the “religious” poems. Some, like the title poem, are clearly devotional; others are fraught with doubt and a sense of my own inadequacy; a couple are openly antagonistic to the whole notion of religion and belief.
I needed them all. Need them all. “God’s truth is life,” writes Patrick Kavanagh, “even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fires.”

GB: An idea/image that spoke to me in this book is the burning of sermons (in “Voice of One Head” and “Hermitage”). I know what I took from that image, and I’m sure other readers find their own meanings in it. What does that particular image/description mean for you?

CW: I don’t really believe we can ever speak clearly and truly of god, much less speak his (his! –even the pronoun is problematic) name. In both of those poems you mention (two of my personal favorites), language and existence have been pushed as far as they can be pushed—by the subjects of the poems, I mean; I’m not claiming this as an accomplishment of the poems—and the silence that ensues is a mixture of mortal defeat and mysterious grace.
Plus, and perhaps more to the point, I just like the sound of “burn” and “sermon” together!


GB: Now, less about topic and more about process…
I’m the kind of writer who spits out lines randomly and eventually tries to put them together into a poem. Your work is very well-crafted, very musical, with an emphasis on sound and rhyme. Do you find it difficult to create poems like these? What is your process like?

CW: I don’t know if it’s difficult. I mean, I don’t really have anything else to compare it to. I never chose to write the way I do. I hear this music in my head, these rhythms wanting to be words, and I can’t get any relief until I get the lines and the rhymes and the rhythms right. Sometimes a poem comes quite easily—the title poem was written in a couple of hours one morning. Sometimes it will take years.


GB: I love “So Much a Poet He Despises Poetry”; it reminds me of being completely burned out on poetry after I finished my poetry MFA program, but yet continuing to immerse myself in it – even being the managing editor of a poetry journal! Do you find being a poet difficult at times? Not just the difficulty in getting published, but do you feel you’re driven to write and/or be involved in poetry, even if perhaps you don’t particularly want to be at any given moment?

CW: Yes, definitely. I get sick of poetry, especially contemporary poetry, and sometimes think I want nothing at all to do with it. And I get tired of the psychic pressures of writing poetry, the mental derangement it can not simply cause but seem to require.
But that poem, I should admit, is actually making fun of someone (me!) who gets so sick and tired of poetry, who feels exhausted by the existential exposure of it (“his soul’s dainties”), who has become so jaded that there’s NOTHING to which he doesn’t respond with a slight sneer.
To hell with that. I wrote the poem as a purgative, because I don’t want to be that person. And because it was actually fun to write.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“To believe is to believe you have been torn/from the abyss, yet stand waveringly on its rim..."

I had the pleasure of hearing Christian Wiman speak last year. In my notes from his lecture, I scribbled, parenthetically, "He has the cadences of a Texas preacher."

Wiman is Texan, and his first name is a clear reference to his personal belief system, but he breaks the stereotypes that may accompany him. He is wise and sophisticated and funny and deep. And these are raw, heartbreaking poems: about people, illness, God, belief, doubt, and yes, there are even some dogs in there. How could I not help but adore this collection? I've been waiting a while to read it, and I wish I had read it sooner (motivated by my strong love of his memoir "My Bright Abyss," which was my favorite nonfiction book of 2013). It's a collection to own and read again and again.

Favorite poems:
“After the Diagnosis”
“The Mole”
“It Takes Particular Clicks”
“Every Riven Thing”
“From a Window”
“Not altogether Gone”
“Hammer Is the Prayer”

[Soren Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is easy to sense - aside from roughly contemporaneous publishing dates - that this work is a concurrent meditation with Wiman's memoir "My Bright Abyss," albeit from the purely poetic. There are numerous poems explicitly dealing with Wiman's bout with cancer and his feelings toward death in general. A poignant tension arises between terrestrial suffering and the hope - or terror - transcendent involvement accords to life. For Wiman, eternity is at times a "dirty word," and at others, the only chance of meaning in the face of nothingness; God is at once an imposition, a perpetrator, and the only word to express the ineffable qualities of existence that make it worth the trouble of poems. And, - as in "My Bright Abyss" - Wiman struggles with the paradoxes of being a poet; the detachment from life the artist pangs to suffer; the hyper-analyzation of the moment, making the moment just out of reach.
In short, "Every Riven Thing" is a devotional piece. It's about life, it's about Christian Wiman, and it's about God, and what the %$*# it all means.

[Andrew Shutes-David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps my favorite poetry anthology ever.

[Caroline Guidry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving, beautiful, intellectual, tearful, lovely, powerful.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

The three words I would pick to describe this collection: elegant, devastating, revelatory.

[Jocelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

When reading Christian Wiman I’m reminded that poetry began as songs. He’s so perceptive of the rhythm of English words, which is illuminated fully in this collection (especially the titular poem). I couldn’t relate to the prevalent religious themes in here but didn’t downgrade it for that, as religion stripped of doctrine seems as good a subject for poetry as any.

[Maddie Hsin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wiman staves off and embraces mortality with this collection.

A couple of standouts for me were the titular Every Riven Thing, Five Houses Down, Lord Is Not A Word, and Hammer Is The Prayer.

This collection takes you on such a journey, and I was moved by Wiman's vulnerability and brutality. A modern day psalmist.

[Daniel]

I read half of this book a couple of years ago and found the poems did little for me. Then I picked it up today and finished where I left off, and found many of the poems I read to be absolute knockouts. So I think this is one I’ll have to read again when I’m even older and wiser. Clearly those few years in between did something to me.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is definitely one of those collections I would have never appreciated had I read it on my own. Studying this for class, though, helped me understand the poems more and gave me a greater appreciation for Wiman's work. This is one of the better modern poetry collections I've read this year.

[Josh Laws · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry collection was recommended in a book club I attend and I am glad I picked it up. Very thoughtful and deep but also surprisingly grounded. I'm not usually a huge poetry person but this definitely spoke to me.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great poems about cancer, nature, God. Tough subjects to explore, tackle, slay, adore.

[Whitney Heflin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very visual poetry. Feels mid-western for sure.
Frequent mentions of dogs. Do like.

[Alexander Fischer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. Prayerful, funny, and brilliant. Highly recommend—Wiman is magic.