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Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair
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.
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.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2023
About the author
Christian Wiman
153 books346 followersChristian 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.
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January 26, 2024
Wow. This is even BETTER than Wiman’s last philosophical book, My Bright Abyss!
Those of you who have read that earlier book will be as amazed as I am.
These are further meditations on the treacherous voyage from an adamantly CHRISTIAN POV to the Zero Point beyond - that point at which the Void yawns wide in our stunned faces - and the shoals of bleak Despair greet us.
Jesus famously says “no man goes to the Father save through Me!” Truer words were never spoken after the awful OT days of prevarication. But for Abraham, there was no loving saviour like we have now in Christ.
Do or die time. You HAD to believe, or embrace the flesh.
Here, we literally catapult back to those primitive OT times, when comforts were few.
Few? The Void lived and breathed in Moses’ day. I think this is what Jesus meant. You’re on your own, kid! There, at the Zero Point, absolute Faith is the only thing we have left.
Do you think clinical depression is a child of the 21st century? Think again. In Roman times guys were falling on their swords to escape the horror of it - same now.
We’re DYING to escape such bleakness.
But Wiman stuns us. To add to his troubles, he has terminal cancer.
And keeps hoping in a Life Beyond, in spite of that.
No, folks:
Don’t hesitate!
BUY this book, if your faith carries the Slightest Element of Doubt in it.
For by Convicting you it will Renew you deeply.
Those of you who have read that earlier book will be as amazed as I am.
These are further meditations on the treacherous voyage from an adamantly CHRISTIAN POV to the Zero Point beyond - that point at which the Void yawns wide in our stunned faces - and the shoals of bleak Despair greet us.
Jesus famously says “no man goes to the Father save through Me!” Truer words were never spoken after the awful OT days of prevarication. But for Abraham, there was no loving saviour like we have now in Christ.
Do or die time. You HAD to believe, or embrace the flesh.
Here, we literally catapult back to those primitive OT times, when comforts were few.
Few? The Void lived and breathed in Moses’ day. I think this is what Jesus meant. You’re on your own, kid! There, at the Zero Point, absolute Faith is the only thing we have left.
Do you think clinical depression is a child of the 21st century? Think again. In Roman times guys were falling on their swords to escape the horror of it - same now.
We’re DYING to escape such bleakness.
But Wiman stuns us. To add to his troubles, he has terminal cancer.
And keeps hoping in a Life Beyond, in spite of that.
No, folks:
Don’t hesitate!
BUY this book, if your faith carries the Slightest Element of Doubt in it.
For by Convicting you it will Renew you deeply.
Read
March 18, 2024For this one, I checked a lot of boxes: memoir (Wiman's past), medical (Wiman's cancer), philosophy-religion (Wiman's ambivalent love for Christianity), poetry (not only Wiman originals, but many other poets' works that have moved him in some way). In short, the kind of book I like because it's one goulash of delights.
Slow, though. If you're an impatient reader who likes to jack-rabbit through pages for the end (Muttering "Next book, next book!" like the White Rabbit), forget it. These essays can get kind of dense, some more than others, and, as is true in any collection, you will find more to like in some outings than in others. Oh and well. One can't be fussy when it comes to reading collections, be they short stories, essays, or poems.
Here's an example of a poem that gives Wiman pause and reason to reason:
A Prayer That Will Be Answered
Lord let me suffer much
and then die
Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear
Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before
Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it
so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love
Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain
And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee's head
-- Anna Kamieńska, tr. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Barańezak
As you can see, the poem brings up lots of Wiman's touchstones, giving him ample opportunity to muse and riff on it.
That's the sort of thing you get here. Some chapters are outright essays. Others outright poems. Others still collections of quotes touching on Wiman topics (read: hope, despair, God, Jesus, life, death, faith, atheism, etc.).
By now, you know whether this is your cuppa or not. For me, yes. For you? Clicking "To Read" (mostly meaningless on GR, admittedly, but still fun) or passing on this review to greener pastures will answer that question.
Slow, though. If you're an impatient reader who likes to jack-rabbit through pages for the end (Muttering "Next book, next book!" like the White Rabbit), forget it. These essays can get kind of dense, some more than others, and, as is true in any collection, you will find more to like in some outings than in others. Oh and well. One can't be fussy when it comes to reading collections, be they short stories, essays, or poems.
Here's an example of a poem that gives Wiman pause and reason to reason:
A Prayer That Will Be Answered
Lord let me suffer much
and then die
Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear
Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before
Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it
so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love
Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain
And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee's head
-- Anna Kamieńska, tr. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Barańezak
As you can see, the poem brings up lots of Wiman's touchstones, giving him ample opportunity to muse and riff on it.
That's the sort of thing you get here. Some chapters are outright essays. Others outright poems. Others still collections of quotes touching on Wiman topics (read: hope, despair, God, Jesus, life, death, faith, atheism, etc.).
By now, you know whether this is your cuppa or not. For me, yes. For you? Clicking "To Read" (mostly meaningless on GR, admittedly, but still fun) or passing on this review to greener pastures will answer that question.
November 1, 2023
I knew nothing about this book, or this author, before picking it up, but I, too, am against despair, so decided to take a chance. Actually, I was drawn to it because some of my favorite recent nonfiction are memoirs or essays written by poets (Hanif Abdurraqib, Maggie Smith, Saeed Jones, Ocean Vuong, Natasha Tretheway) so this one intrigued me. And after reading just a few chapters, I had already placed a previous Wiman memoir and poetry collection on hold, as I encountered writing that was both beautiful and thought-provoking and recognized some shared sensibilities in his views. At one point, Wiman claims he has a “Ninja Blender of a brain”, and these 50 pieces reflect that, with wide-ranging topics and a mix of essay, memory, criticism, poems by himself and others, a sort of commonplace book. But his two most prevalent topics are poetry and faith, the ways they are similar and intertwine, and the liberation and limitations of both to stave off or communicate despair. Wiman is both the former editor of Poetry magazine and on the faculty of Yale's Divinity School, thus the confluence of topics. Not all of these 50 pieces resonated with me—or to be honest, I always understood—but the ones that did, hit hard.
One example of this: “Because not only am I convinced that there is a lifting energy, an answering appeal and promise, in precisely this most interior ice of human loneliness, which no human love can ever quite crack, but I am also convinced—no, I cling to the notion, I ache acutely with the vaguest of aims and strain to call it faith—that there is in human love both a plea for, and a promise of, the love of God. Loneliness, as Shestov says, may be the last word of philosophy. But it is the first word of faith. And what is the last word of faith? Love.”
This passage, and a lot of this book, seems to be in conversation with David James Duncan’s Sun House, which I read earlier this year. (Both quote Meister Eckhart a fair deal). In this collection, like Sun House, I may not completely identify with where each of them find answers or even where they look for them, but their questions, their seeking, their yearning is something that does resonate with me. And once I realized that in both books, I was able to appreciate them more.
Another passage that gets at this: “The power of the word of God comes not from its solidity, not from its being hammered into stones with which to beat the heads of humans. No, the power of the word of God, just like the power of poetry, comes precisely from its mercurial meanings, its tendency to slide free of every attempt to pin it down and to insinuate itself into every single life in a different way.”
One example of this: “Because not only am I convinced that there is a lifting energy, an answering appeal and promise, in precisely this most interior ice of human loneliness, which no human love can ever quite crack, but I am also convinced—no, I cling to the notion, I ache acutely with the vaguest of aims and strain to call it faith—that there is in human love both a plea for, and a promise of, the love of God. Loneliness, as Shestov says, may be the last word of philosophy. But it is the first word of faith. And what is the last word of faith? Love.”
This passage, and a lot of this book, seems to be in conversation with David James Duncan’s Sun House, which I read earlier this year. (Both quote Meister Eckhart a fair deal). In this collection, like Sun House, I may not completely identify with where each of them find answers or even where they look for them, but their questions, their seeking, their yearning is something that does resonate with me. And once I realized that in both books, I was able to appreciate them more.
Another passage that gets at this: “The power of the word of God comes not from its solidity, not from its being hammered into stones with which to beat the heads of humans. No, the power of the word of God, just like the power of poetry, comes precisely from its mercurial meanings, its tendency to slide free of every attempt to pin it down and to insinuate itself into every single life in a different way.”
Read
October 1, 2025I think my mistake here was to partake of this as an audiobook. I thought that listening during my daily walks or during my car commute would be the perfect way to ingest these meditations on poetry and faith. Instead I often felt lost, or bored, which is so unfortunate because poetry is at its best in aural form- it's meant to be heard at least as much as read. However, it wasn't the poetry that lost me, it was Wiman's complex, erudite, meandering, sometimes droning, revelations. Zero weaves memoir, essay, poetry, philosophy, theology in fifty-two entries (yes, fifty-two), some as brief as a page, others thick with family stories, musings, or questions without answers. All imbued with Christian Wiman's brilliant but dark questioning of faith in the midst of suffering. Despite its subtitle, however, it keeps despair close at hand. Caresses it. Sometimes, I'm sad to say, fetishizes it.
The sections that were purely memoir, particularly the lengthy section in the middle about his dad, and that gorgeous opening featuring his twin daughters, were the most resonant. Otherwise, I felt like I'd walked into the middle of a conversation between two over-caffeinated, over-educated hipster atheists who were trying to outdo each other with the $.25 words. At times, it seems that Wiman is trying to talk himself out of his faith, or is somehow embarrassed by it because the worlds of academe and highbrow literature are themselves deeply embarrassed by faith. He had to dial in some political observations, too, which were jarring and unnecessary. But this is the bread-and-butter of his writing, his platform as it were: to bring voice to the ambivalence and doubt those who have chosen to believe despite all the evidence that faith is futile.
I've been transfixed and transformed by Wiman's other works on the intersection of poetry and faith—but something of his joy and confidence is lost here. Again, had I read this instead of listened, I could have lingered over passages, teasing out their meanings and enjoyed the poetry he chose to gird his theses, so I withhold rating it out of fairness to the author's intent.
The sections that were purely memoir, particularly the lengthy section in the middle about his dad, and that gorgeous opening featuring his twin daughters, were the most resonant. Otherwise, I felt like I'd walked into the middle of a conversation between two over-caffeinated, over-educated hipster atheists who were trying to outdo each other with the $.25 words. At times, it seems that Wiman is trying to talk himself out of his faith, or is somehow embarrassed by it because the worlds of academe and highbrow literature are themselves deeply embarrassed by faith. He had to dial in some political observations, too, which were jarring and unnecessary. But this is the bread-and-butter of his writing, his platform as it were: to bring voice to the ambivalence and doubt those who have chosen to believe despite all the evidence that faith is futile.
I've been transfixed and transformed by Wiman's other works on the intersection of poetry and faith—but something of his joy and confidence is lost here. Again, had I read this instead of listened, I could have lingered over passages, teasing out their meanings and enjoyed the poetry he chose to gird his theses, so I withhold rating it out of fairness to the author's intent.
February 12, 2024
“One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. ‘I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,’ writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, ‘and You gave them to me.’”
Moving meditations on poetry and despair, from a doubt-wracked Christian poet who has spent many intimate years with cancer. A lot of it was over my head, but most of it prickled my imagination and deepened my faith.
January 20, 2024
4.5 stars
“There is no middle ground.
There is our empty bench.
There is the stoop of pigeons.
Either I have been alone
Every hour of my life or
Never once, not even
One moment, and the mist rising.”
-Donald Revell
This poem feels summative of the spirit of this book. An absolute treasure trove of quotes, poems, and insights about living in the in-between. Alone and not alone at all!!! Plus reading Wiman on snowy days feels closer to Wheaton years than just about anything.
“There is no middle ground.
There is our empty bench.
There is the stoop of pigeons.
Either I have been alone
Every hour of my life or
Never once, not even
One moment, and the mist rising.”
-Donald Revell
This poem feels summative of the spirit of this book. An absolute treasure trove of quotes, poems, and insights about living in the in-between. Alone and not alone at all!!! Plus reading Wiman on snowy days feels closer to Wheaton years than just about anything.
June 12, 2024
Well now what do I do.
August 8, 2024
More than a few have tried, but so few writers SHOULD play with form to this extent. Christian Wiman is one of the elect. The intimacy Wiman offers through this book's structure is precious. The fluidity between poetry and essay and other, non-definable forms, isn't for the sake of creativity or the artist's ego. It's pure vulnerability. Somehow his editor has done the real job of editing (nothing about this volume is unserious) while preserving a sense of stream of consciousness. Wiman is showing us - and he didn't owe it to anyone to do so - how he thinks. He's welcoming us in to see, after all he's been through, the hyper-specific ways his mind churns. By necessity, this includes other's words - this is how you know he's a writer to his core. One should admire, not criticize, the saturation of borrowed words in this book. Wiman bows in humility when another poet, another theologian, has strung language to the precise shape he needs. Paraphrasing might've been an act of despair. Is that dramatic? So many of us, too, repeat the quotations we hold dear in our journals, in our captions, on our sticky notes - we enter them into the record, the ether - against despair. Probably, and probably without knowing it most of the time, we're choosing language that resonates somewhere less reachable with our reasonable mind. The bone, if you will. We make and collect these entries against despair, tucking them into ourselves where we hope they'll reach the core and maybe, make a difference. We do this privately. What a gift it is to peer into one of the most incredible living minds.
"One doesn't follow God in hope of happiness but because one sense - miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels - a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute - and perhaps even annihilating - awe." (p. 5)
"But do I think that sometimes life and language break each other open to change, that a rupture in one can be a rapture in the other, that sometimes there are, as it were, words underneath the words - even the very Word underneath the words? Yes, I do." (p. 13)
"...there are truths that depend upon the very contortions they untangle." (p. 15)
"Here's an obvious truth: I am somewhat ambivalent about religion - and not simply the institutional manifestations, which even a saint could hate, but sometimes, too many times, all of it, the very meat of it, the whole goddamned shebang. Here's another: I believe that the question of faith - which is ultimately separable from the question of 'religion' - is the single most important question that any person asks in and of her life, and that every life is an answer to this question, whether she has addressed it consciously or not.
As for myself, I have found faith to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound. As for my children, I would like them to be free of whatever particular kink there is in me that turns every spiritual impulse into anguish. Failing that, I would like them to be free to make of their anguish a means of peace, for themselves or others (or both), with art or action (or both). Failing that - and I suppose, ultimately, here in the ceaseless machinery of implacable matter, there is only failure - I would like them to be able to pray, keeping in mind the fact that, as Saint Anthony of the Desert said, a true prayer is one that you do not understand." (p. 15)
"Yet I keep thinking of Jurgen Moltmann writing about the cross: 'It alienates alienated men, who have come to terms with alienation.' I'm not saying that this [aforementioned, unnamed] novelist, who is Jewish, needs to turn to Jesus. I'm saying that he is not disquieted enough by, seems in fact attached to, his own alienation. This is a toy despair. It's entertaining, brilliant at times, but it cannot help me." (p. 56-57)
"My pilgrim's progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could finally reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am." - Carl Jung, Letters I: 1906-1950
"But the effort I want to make is not to become more lucid and straightforward but to become forceful and vivid enough that the discomfiting ambiguities of the poems will have to be swallowed and even a little digested." - quoted in The Force of Desire: A Life of William Bronk, by Lyman Gilmore
"But to believe in nothing is a belief. It is a consolation to declare that you will never be consoled." (p. 123)
"A dear friend of mine whose work has come to nothing (publicly, that is) writes in a letter, 'I remain loyal to the irrationality of it,' which makes perfect piercing sense, because what else that most matters in life do we find and keep by way of reason? Love? God?" (p. 143-144)
"'Keep your mind in hell,' said Sailouan the Athonite, 'and despair not." (p. 145)
"Anyway, I'm tired of all this talk of literature as moral agent, beauty cultivating empathy (please), poetry as prayer, the endless instrumentalization of art." (p. 221)
"One doesn't put that kind of pressure on literature, or have those sorts of expectations (that, essentially, it will leave a trace, that it will in fact save you) unless there is spiritual anguish churning deep under the surface." (p. 222)
"Human beings are called upon to live in their inmost region and to have themselves as much in hand as is possible only from that center point; only from there can they rightly come to terms with the world. Only from there can they find the place in the world that has been intended for them. In all of this, they can never see through this inmost region completely. It is God's mystery, which God alone can reveal to the degree that pleases him." - Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that religious men and women are not saints; they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their life. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet or some other saint." - Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
"...and I wake to that unshakeable PERHAPS that carries me / through the wavering world. / And each abstract picture of the world is as impossible as the / blueprint of a storm." - Tomas Transtomer, "Brief Paucse in the Organ Recital," tr. by Robin Fulton
"And yet no real artist ever made a thing that some deep wound didn't first demand." (p. 272)
"One doesn't follow God in hope of happiness but because one sense - miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels - a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute - and perhaps even annihilating - awe." (p. 5)
"But do I think that sometimes life and language break each other open to change, that a rupture in one can be a rapture in the other, that sometimes there are, as it were, words underneath the words - even the very Word underneath the words? Yes, I do." (p. 13)
"...there are truths that depend upon the very contortions they untangle." (p. 15)
"Here's an obvious truth: I am somewhat ambivalent about religion - and not simply the institutional manifestations, which even a saint could hate, but sometimes, too many times, all of it, the very meat of it, the whole goddamned shebang. Here's another: I believe that the question of faith - which is ultimately separable from the question of 'religion' - is the single most important question that any person asks in and of her life, and that every life is an answer to this question, whether she has addressed it consciously or not.
As for myself, I have found faith to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound. As for my children, I would like them to be free of whatever particular kink there is in me that turns every spiritual impulse into anguish. Failing that, I would like them to be free to make of their anguish a means of peace, for themselves or others (or both), with art or action (or both). Failing that - and I suppose, ultimately, here in the ceaseless machinery of implacable matter, there is only failure - I would like them to be able to pray, keeping in mind the fact that, as Saint Anthony of the Desert said, a true prayer is one that you do not understand." (p. 15)
"Yet I keep thinking of Jurgen Moltmann writing about the cross: 'It alienates alienated men, who have come to terms with alienation.' I'm not saying that this [aforementioned, unnamed] novelist, who is Jewish, needs to turn to Jesus. I'm saying that he is not disquieted enough by, seems in fact attached to, his own alienation. This is a toy despair. It's entertaining, brilliant at times, but it cannot help me." (p. 56-57)
"My pilgrim's progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could finally reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am." - Carl Jung, Letters I: 1906-1950
"But the effort I want to make is not to become more lucid and straightforward but to become forceful and vivid enough that the discomfiting ambiguities of the poems will have to be swallowed and even a little digested." - quoted in The Force of Desire: A Life of William Bronk, by Lyman Gilmore
"But to believe in nothing is a belief. It is a consolation to declare that you will never be consoled." (p. 123)
"A dear friend of mine whose work has come to nothing (publicly, that is) writes in a letter, 'I remain loyal to the irrationality of it,' which makes perfect piercing sense, because what else that most matters in life do we find and keep by way of reason? Love? God?" (p. 143-144)
"'Keep your mind in hell,' said Sailouan the Athonite, 'and despair not." (p. 145)
"Anyway, I'm tired of all this talk of literature as moral agent, beauty cultivating empathy (please), poetry as prayer, the endless instrumentalization of art." (p. 221)
"One doesn't put that kind of pressure on literature, or have those sorts of expectations (that, essentially, it will leave a trace, that it will in fact save you) unless there is spiritual anguish churning deep under the surface." (p. 222)
"Human beings are called upon to live in their inmost region and to have themselves as much in hand as is possible only from that center point; only from there can they rightly come to terms with the world. Only from there can they find the place in the world that has been intended for them. In all of this, they can never see through this inmost region completely. It is God's mystery, which God alone can reveal to the degree that pleases him." - Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that religious men and women are not saints; they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their life. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet or some other saint." - Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
"...and I wake to that unshakeable PERHAPS that carries me / through the wavering world. / And each abstract picture of the world is as impossible as the / blueprint of a storm." - Tomas Transtomer, "Brief Paucse in the Organ Recital," tr. by Robin Fulton
"And yet no real artist ever made a thing that some deep wound didn't first demand." (p. 272)
Read
March 19, 2024I’ve long claimed Christian Wiman to be one of my favorite writers, if not for his incisive poetry, then for his prose, which gave voice to the dizzying emotions I used to feel toward Christianity and its beliefs. Reading this book—and enjoying it very much, despite going through it at an intentional snail’s pace—has made it clear that my emotions about spirituality are very different now than they were when I was a wide-eyed college student. His writing—especially in the memoir sections—is as affecting as ever, and I’m glad Wiman is writing books like this one, even (especially?) if they’re not entirely for me anymore.
June 6, 2026
My first Christian Wiman, and certainly not my last. Long-form narrative memoir essays, original poetry, quote collections, poetry analysis—this wandering, probing experiment is part English class, part sermon, part journal entry, part commonplace book. I fear I've just ruined anyone's interest in it with that sentence. But any adjectives I could apply feel trite for this masterpiece. Flipping back through it to record quotes made me want to start at the beginning and read it all again.
What can I say, I'm a sucker for the anguish of faith, the bitterness of prayer, and the face of the void and the Spirit that hovers above it. Wiman is a Jacob-level wrestler, and the way he speaks about his wife and daughters places the expression of his pain and angst above a bottomless pit of tenderness and grace. He is also an incisive observer of life and a genius artist; I'm a far better poet and reader of poetry after watching him interrogate, surrender to, explore the many poems he dialogues with.
My favorite entries (limiting myself to these was hard):
I Will Love You in the Summertime
Can This Sin Live
Particular Flesh
A Prison Gets to Be a Friend
The Drift of the World
The White Buffalo
Bomb
The Rock and the Rot
Ifs Eternally
I Sang Pain
Woman, with Tomato
The Cancer Chair
No Omen but Awe
We talked openly and almost entirely of drugs—the allure, the fidelity of them, the existential relief one feels to know that this thing is there when you need it (unlike family, I did not say, unlike art or God), and the demonic ferocity of their claim.
~
Because not only am I convinced that there's a lifting energy, an answering appeal and promise, in precisely this most interior ice of human loneliness, which no human love can ever quite crack, but I'm also convinced—no, I cling to the notion, I ache acutely with the vaguest of aims and strain to call it faith—that there is in human love both a plea for, and a promise of, the love of God.
Loneliness, as Shestov says, may be the last word of philosophy. But it's the first word of faith. And what is the last word of faith? Love.
~
One doesn't follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”
~
How much of life is living up to a call we're never quite sure we heard? Peter's answer is the one that scripture has him giving immediately— “You are the Christ”—and it is also his adamant denial of Jesus in Jerusalem. It is the church founded on Peter's name, and it is the immutable muteness that lies within every authoritative statement that every church attempts to make. The truth and the lie. The rock and the rot. There is no one answer to Jesus's question, and yet you must wager everything upon it.
~
Who do you say that I am? The power of the word of God comes not from its solidity, not from its being hammered into stones with which to beat the heads of humans. No, the power of the word of God, just like the power of poetry, comes precisely from its mercurial meanings, its tendency to slide free of every attempt to pin it down and to insinuate itself into every single life in a different way.
What can I say, I'm a sucker for the anguish of faith, the bitterness of prayer, and the face of the void and the Spirit that hovers above it. Wiman is a Jacob-level wrestler, and the way he speaks about his wife and daughters places the expression of his pain and angst above a bottomless pit of tenderness and grace. He is also an incisive observer of life and a genius artist; I'm a far better poet and reader of poetry after watching him interrogate, surrender to, explore the many poems he dialogues with.
My favorite entries (limiting myself to these was hard):
I Will Love You in the Summertime
Can This Sin Live
Particular Flesh
A Prison Gets to Be a Friend
The Drift of the World
The White Buffalo
Bomb
The Rock and the Rot
Ifs Eternally
I Sang Pain
Woman, with Tomato
The Cancer Chair
No Omen but Awe
We talked openly and almost entirely of drugs—the allure, the fidelity of them, the existential relief one feels to know that this thing is there when you need it (unlike family, I did not say, unlike art or God), and the demonic ferocity of their claim.
~
Because not only am I convinced that there's a lifting energy, an answering appeal and promise, in precisely this most interior ice of human loneliness, which no human love can ever quite crack, but I'm also convinced—no, I cling to the notion, I ache acutely with the vaguest of aims and strain to call it faith—that there is in human love both a plea for, and a promise of, the love of God.
Loneliness, as Shestov says, may be the last word of philosophy. But it's the first word of faith. And what is the last word of faith? Love.
~
One doesn't follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”
~
How much of life is living up to a call we're never quite sure we heard? Peter's answer is the one that scripture has him giving immediately— “You are the Christ”—and it is also his adamant denial of Jesus in Jerusalem. It is the church founded on Peter's name, and it is the immutable muteness that lies within every authoritative statement that every church attempts to make. The truth and the lie. The rock and the rot. There is no one answer to Jesus's question, and yet you must wager everything upon it.
~
Who do you say that I am? The power of the word of God comes not from its solidity, not from its being hammered into stones with which to beat the heads of humans. No, the power of the word of God, just like the power of poetry, comes precisely from its mercurial meanings, its tendency to slide free of every attempt to pin it down and to insinuate itself into every single life in a different way.
February 17, 2024
Giving this 4 stars. If I'd read it in college, it would be 5. In my current season of life, it would be 3. In other words, it demands more careful time and attention to be truly savored than I actually devoted to it.
March 18, 2024
I LOVED this book. Here are some highlights:
“I have found faith to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem able to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound. As for my children, I would like them to be free of whatever particular kink there is in me that turns every spiritual impulse into anguish.”
“Loneliness is a condition that God both eases and is.”
“The lecture was on the line between belief and unbelief, and how there is no line, really, how to be devout means to be at risk, to live with the understanding that all one’s assumptions might be overturned in the blink of an eye, that even the nothingness that swallows up every last atom of faith might be, if we have eyes and ears to perceive it, a piece of grace.”
“A poem that’s reducible to a message is not a good poem. A poem you can paraphrase in prose is not a good poem. I feel absurd saying such banalities, but much have I traveled in the realms of the Dull, wherein preachers and teachers and other professional talkers treat poems like wisdom machines or shortcuts to a conclusion. It’s like holding up a river stone far from the river. Dry and drab, the stone gives no hint of the gleam that made one marvel in the first place….ultimately the music is its meaning.”
“Now I am here.
No diamond, no time, no omen but awe
That a whirlwind could in not cohering cohere.
Loss is my gift, bewilderment my bow.”
“I have found faith to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem able to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound. As for my children, I would like them to be free of whatever particular kink there is in me that turns every spiritual impulse into anguish.”
“Loneliness is a condition that God both eases and is.”
“The lecture was on the line between belief and unbelief, and how there is no line, really, how to be devout means to be at risk, to live with the understanding that all one’s assumptions might be overturned in the blink of an eye, that even the nothingness that swallows up every last atom of faith might be, if we have eyes and ears to perceive it, a piece of grace.”
“A poem that’s reducible to a message is not a good poem. A poem you can paraphrase in prose is not a good poem. I feel absurd saying such banalities, but much have I traveled in the realms of the Dull, wherein preachers and teachers and other professional talkers treat poems like wisdom machines or shortcuts to a conclusion. It’s like holding up a river stone far from the river. Dry and drab, the stone gives no hint of the gleam that made one marvel in the first place….ultimately the music is its meaning.”
“Now I am here.
No diamond, no time, no omen but awe
That a whirlwind could in not cohering cohere.
Loss is my gift, bewilderment my bow.”
January 5, 2024
“People who have been away from God,” writes Christian Wiman, “tend to come back by one of two ways: extreme lack or extreme love, an overmastering sorrow or a strangely disabling joy. Either the world is not enough for the hole that has opened in you, or it is too much. The two impulses are intimately related and it may be that the most authentic spiritual existence inheres in being able to perceive one state when you are squarely in the midst of the other. The mortal shadow that shadows even the most intense joy. The immortal joy that can give even the darkest sorrow a fugitive gleam.”
If that paragraph resonates with you, so will the book. If it doesn’t, well, it won’t.
Wiman, whose work has comforted and confounded me over the years, has here set out to grapple—as only he can—with the mysteries and paradoxes of hope and despair, sorrow and joy. The book is comprised of fifty chapters of varying length, bracketed by a prologue and epilogue, both titled “Zero.” Some of the “entries” are nothing more than a single short poem. Others are longer essays. Others still read like a commonplace book; entry #18, for example, consists of a series of possibly related quotes from Zora Neale Hurston, Yehuda Amichai, Søren Kierkegaard, W.B. Yeats, Katie Farris, August Kleinzahler, Vernon Watkins, Gabriel García Márquez, and George Oppen.
These entries were written, it becomes clear, over many years. And for most of that time, Wiman was living with what seemed to be an incurable cancer. (As of last spring, he is in remission.)
“I had—have—cancer,” he writes in one of the early entries. “I have been living with it—dying with it—for so long now that it bores me, or baffles me, or drives me into the furthest crannies of literature and theology in search of something that will both speak and spare my own pain.”
Zero at the Bone doesn’t lend itself to summary; CliffsNotes ain’t happening here. That’s because Wiman isn’t making some singular, easily regurgitatable argument. He’s not solving a problem with actionable data. In these entries he’s searching and wrestling, lamenting and hoping. You can’t accuse him of not telling the truth.
More at timhoiland.com
If that paragraph resonates with you, so will the book. If it doesn’t, well, it won’t.
Wiman, whose work has comforted and confounded me over the years, has here set out to grapple—as only he can—with the mysteries and paradoxes of hope and despair, sorrow and joy. The book is comprised of fifty chapters of varying length, bracketed by a prologue and epilogue, both titled “Zero.” Some of the “entries” are nothing more than a single short poem. Others are longer essays. Others still read like a commonplace book; entry #18, for example, consists of a series of possibly related quotes from Zora Neale Hurston, Yehuda Amichai, Søren Kierkegaard, W.B. Yeats, Katie Farris, August Kleinzahler, Vernon Watkins, Gabriel García Márquez, and George Oppen.
These entries were written, it becomes clear, over many years. And for most of that time, Wiman was living with what seemed to be an incurable cancer. (As of last spring, he is in remission.)
“I had—have—cancer,” he writes in one of the early entries. “I have been living with it—dying with it—for so long now that it bores me, or baffles me, or drives me into the furthest crannies of literature and theology in search of something that will both speak and spare my own pain.”
Zero at the Bone doesn’t lend itself to summary; CliffsNotes ain’t happening here. That’s because Wiman isn’t making some singular, easily regurgitatable argument. He’s not solving a problem with actionable data. In these entries he’s searching and wrestling, lamenting and hoping. You can’t accuse him of not telling the truth.
More at timhoiland.com
October 24, 2024
About half-way through this "memoir" I was rating this one higher. It's an odd book, with lots of poetry, built around Wiman's "Fifty Elegies" against despair. This can take the form of extended essays, or simply poems themselves., sometimes with no explanations as to how a poem (usually Wiman's own) may work against despair. That can be very hit or miss. Wiman's poetry tastes are exceptional, but the book also includes a great deal of Wiman's poetry, which are often knotty and impenetrable. On one hand Wiman deserves a shout-out for such a revealing book that works the outer ring of experience, Faith, and Art. That said, the abstractions here often escaped me. And I say this as someone who often re-read what was puzzling me. The book deserves more than two stars, but I need to have a greater understanding or connection to the material to get that higher rating. The last half of the book made for an excruciating slog.
April 9, 2024
This author caught my attention in an interview on PBS about this, his new book. He describes it as a collection of essays and poetry written during a period in his life in which he strives to come to terms with despair. He had been diagnosed with incurable cancer and suffering debilitating pain. It’s an intriguing topic. But I found his poetry and prose exceeding dense and difficult to read. I started skipping the poetry and browsing the essay chapters, but honestly got very little out of it.
August 25, 2024
To borrow a phrase from a poet he quotes often, Wiman has mastered the art of telling it slant. I don't read enough poetry to say this with any real authority, but I know of no other writer whose sentences have more space to climb down inside and look around. And once you're inside, you can't help but look up. Which, I suppose, for a poet who can't help but write about God--in his presence or in his absence--is precisely the point.
September 24, 2025
First book I chose for my Capstone reading list and honestly really glad I started with this one. Wiman does a great job of writing sincerely on difficult questions about life and faith. I appreciate his honesty with the reader instead of tying everything up with a pretty red bow, which I feel is common amongst Christians writing about God and faith and just unrealistic to the reality of life and journeys of faith. He touches on such a variety of compelling and relevant topics that the book doesn't feel like it's dragging for being such a long collection but there's a clear common thread running through his work. I significantly enjoyed Wiman's essays over his poetry. My issue with his poetry is he delved too far into the abstract in my opinion and lost the reader. I struggle to see why I should care to solve the random riddle of the poem. If you are trying to connect with a reader or an audience, why would you explicitly write something you know they won't understand? In my opinion his poetry went beyond just the abstract of having to critically read it a couple times to get something out of it. At times it felt he was just being pretentious. However I felt the opposite about his essays, which were the primary content of this book. I have so many bookmarked to go back and reread. His use of personal experience and anecdotes tied into a bigger idea of spirituality and faith and the human struggle for purpose was excellent and so touching. I loved it.
I don't think I'll ever forget his essay about his rescue dog that culminated in this line: "there is not a person reading these words, there is not a friend or family member from whom you feel utterly estranged, there is not even a solipsistic and apparently unsalvageable man sitting in the White House who does not have, festering somewhere, a bullet in them."
Bro was dropping banger after banger throughout this.
"As for myself, I have found faith to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound."
Bro was cooking.
"For that's what Eve brought into this world, consciousness, or perhaps more accurately the sin of separating consciousness from God. The loneliness no human love can ever quite answer. And if you are not lonely under this dividing and indifferent blue, if you do not feel, even amid your moments of happiness, some absolute inwardness that is absolute otherness, then, friend, you are either preternaturally enlightened or completely unconscious."
Only giving it 3 stars though because his poetry pissed me off so much. I really want to check out his book "My Bright Abyss" though! His writing is so good I got Kampa to buy it and read it now.
I don't think I'll ever forget his essay about his rescue dog that culminated in this line: "there is not a person reading these words, there is not a friend or family member from whom you feel utterly estranged, there is not even a solipsistic and apparently unsalvageable man sitting in the White House who does not have, festering somewhere, a bullet in them."
Bro was dropping banger after banger throughout this.
"As for myself, I have found faith to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound."
Bro was cooking.
"For that's what Eve brought into this world, consciousness, or perhaps more accurately the sin of separating consciousness from God. The loneliness no human love can ever quite answer. And if you are not lonely under this dividing and indifferent blue, if you do not feel, even amid your moments of happiness, some absolute inwardness that is absolute otherness, then, friend, you are either preternaturally enlightened or completely unconscious."
Only giving it 3 stars though because his poetry pissed me off so much. I really want to check out his book "My Bright Abyss" though! His writing is so good I got Kampa to buy it and read it now.
March 27, 2024
Oh my goodness, this book made me realize how much of life I have yet to wrestle with. It forced me to think deeply, to understand the authors pieces, and connect his sources to his work. The way Christian Wiman articulates his thoughts is incredible and paints such a picture through his essays, poetry, and resources. Everything he says is backed up by renowned writers and poets adding that much more weight to what he is saying.
I will say this read less like a book and more like a work of art. With that in mind it did change the scale in which I rated it. I can’t say I could easily compare it to the other pieces of fiction or nonfiction I’ve read this year. It doesn’t hold a particular storyline but it worked for the purpose this book was intended.
This is a work meant to sit in and spend time with. I could easily see myself coming back to it and rereading it. It is broken up into 50 separate essays/topics and can each be read individually without context.
5/5 stars
I will say this read less like a book and more like a work of art. With that in mind it did change the scale in which I rated it. I can’t say I could easily compare it to the other pieces of fiction or nonfiction I’ve read this year. It doesn’t hold a particular storyline but it worked for the purpose this book was intended.
This is a work meant to sit in and spend time with. I could easily see myself coming back to it and rereading it. It is broken up into 50 separate essays/topics and can each be read individually without context.
5/5 stars
July 1, 2025
The entries here are a mixed bag as far as I'm concerned, but when they are good, they are very good. #1 and #28 will especially stick with me.
At times, Wiman plays a little too much on the far edge of apophatic theology etc for me, but at other times he also seems to argue with himself over this instinct—the entries a kind of conversation between competing instincts / allegiances of his (something made explicit in one of the entries, which is itself written as a point/counterpoint dialogue with himself). Given this, one cannot really take one entry or a quote from one entry and claim it as Wiman's view—the ongoing dialogue of the book has to remain the context.
This is also mirrored in the form the book takes—sometimes essays, sometimes poetry, sometimes commonplace book—"the storm of forms and needs, the intuitions and impossibilities, that I feel myself to be. That I feel life to be." Inside the storm of Wiman's mind I find some clear and startling insights, some things I am deeply moved by, and some things to question, but I was glad to have been caught up in it.
At times, Wiman plays a little too much on the far edge of apophatic theology etc for me, but at other times he also seems to argue with himself over this instinct—the entries a kind of conversation between competing instincts / allegiances of his (something made explicit in one of the entries, which is itself written as a point/counterpoint dialogue with himself). Given this, one cannot really take one entry or a quote from one entry and claim it as Wiman's view—the ongoing dialogue of the book has to remain the context.
This is also mirrored in the form the book takes—sometimes essays, sometimes poetry, sometimes commonplace book—"the storm of forms and needs, the intuitions and impossibilities, that I feel myself to be. That I feel life to be." Inside the storm of Wiman's mind I find some clear and startling insights, some things I am deeply moved by, and some things to question, but I was glad to have been caught up in it.
July 22, 2026
My first introduction to Wiman, and admittedly my first serious foray into the world of poetry! Slower read than I thought it would be but that’s okay.
This feels important in the same way Cormac McCarthy’s Sunset Limited felt important to me. There’s a hope in the hopelessness, or something.
I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine (also a Christian) where we were talking about marriage, and his thought (he’s not married) was “why don’t people just pray for freedom from marriage problems and be better?” To which I replied that sometimes God is silent. He wasn’t a fan of that response.
I want to recommend (maybe prescribe is a better word?) this book to him and others like him, but I’m also afraid that he would either fear for my soul or miss the point entirely. So it goes.
This feels important in the same way Cormac McCarthy’s Sunset Limited felt important to me. There’s a hope in the hopelessness, or something.
I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine (also a Christian) where we were talking about marriage, and his thought (he’s not married) was “why don’t people just pray for freedom from marriage problems and be better?” To which I replied that sometimes God is silent. He wasn’t a fan of that response.
I want to recommend (maybe prescribe is a better word?) this book to him and others like him, but I’m also afraid that he would either fear for my soul or miss the point entirely. So it goes.
January 4, 2025
“Does this mean that religion and poetry are essentially the same thing?”
An odd amalgamation of poetry, essays, and excerpts, that asks us to find the antidote to despair without every providing the antidote. Far from a self-help book, Wiman’s work is more or less Camusian in that it finds God in the very absurdness of finding God itself. Poetry not just a dying literary genre but as the very metaphysical relation between all things, a true capital P-Poetry. Frustrating. Anticlimactic. Profoundly moving. Probably something I will find myself returning to for the rest of my life.
An odd amalgamation of poetry, essays, and excerpts, that asks us to find the antidote to despair without every providing the antidote. Far from a self-help book, Wiman’s work is more or less Camusian in that it finds God in the very absurdness of finding God itself. Poetry not just a dying literary genre but as the very metaphysical relation between all things, a true capital P-Poetry. Frustrating. Anticlimactic. Profoundly moving. Probably something I will find myself returning to for the rest of my life.
April 6, 2025
I loved everything about this book.
I wouldn’t recommend attempting to read it straight through over a short period of time as I initially attempted. That initial binge was overwhelming. Rather, Wiman’s short essays and poetry (like most poetry, though I admittedly have read embarrassingly little) digest best in small morsels—there’s plenty to savor and feel at just 1-2 entries per day.
I wouldn’t recommend attempting to read it straight through over a short period of time as I initially attempted. That initial binge was overwhelming. Rather, Wiman’s short essays and poetry (like most poetry, though I admittedly have read embarrassingly little) digest best in small morsels—there’s plenty to savor and feel at just 1-2 entries per day.
May 11, 2025
Going to have to reread this one. Beautiful beautiful writing on religion, suffering, poetry and of course despair, and a wonderful repository of quotes. Just a bit choppy structure-wise. This review is also beautifully written for anyone interested: https://www.literarymatters.org/16-3-...
July 11, 2024
I always find reading Christian Wiman genius, baffling, over my head, thought-provoking, worthwhile, and at least adjacent to if not touching my heart of the matter.
August 4, 2024
On the personal mt Rushmore
January 7, 2025
Wild and winding, infused with clarity but no certainty. reading it is somewhat like squinting into the sun as it whites out the landscape—distilled, diffuse.
There is something essential about the experience of loving God here.
There is something essential about the experience of loving God here.
January 6, 2024
Some parts resounded deeply with me, but/and much of this was difficult, as in: not easy to understand. I had to slow myself down (as I should more often). I enjoyed the hodge-podge nature and especially the entries composed entirely of poem fragments from other writers, building on a subtle theme.
March 9, 2025
Genius on so many levels
December 24, 2025
Actual rating: 4.5. At times a little too dense and speculative for my tastes, but there’s SO much good stuff in here.
August 13, 2026
“One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe.”, p. 5
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