In the summer of 1970, Elizabeth Hardwick may have been the best nonfiction prose writer in America, just as Jim Hines was the fastest man alive and Joe Frazier was the heavyweight champion of the world. She was the queen mother of the New York Review of Books, one of its four cofounders and . . . . Continue Reading »
The peak that paints the lakeIs quick to break. A height becomes a depth,A life a death. An Eiger sinks beneathThe eager cleat As seeking shows us whatWe sought is not. To find a seeker’s pleasureIn self-erasure The mountaineer must wishHerself to mist. —Amit Majmudar Photo by thijser . . . . Continue Reading »
How often when we are lostor in pain, we cry out to God— even if we don’t believe in the one who isboth father & mother— And how often we are met with a wall of silence,and wrongly assume, that is no answer. So we believe God must not exist. Perhaps what we miss is how God says, . . . . Continue Reading »
“Sing it again,” I want to ask them bothas I sit here alone behind mesh drapeson paper drawn across a vinyl table—easier to clean but somehow sticky,not cold, instead uncomfortably warm,as though I feel the heat of the last patients(old man? sad woman?), as though they might be catching. . . . . Continue Reading »
Jacob and Esau struggled in the womb right from the start. Rebekah’s ultrasound, quite early on, revealed the embryos: yin and yang, two fat big-headed commas grappled together head to toe;Rebekah only twenty weeks along,they were duking it out in there already. The sonogram was the usual fuzzy . . . . Continue Reading »
In The River of the Immaculate Conception, James Matthew Wilson confirms his vocation as a public poet. Commissioned by the Benedict XVI Institute, this poem sequence of seven parts leads us through the lives of St. Juan Diego, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, and Père Marquette, with interludes on . . . . Continue Reading »
Our crosses chip away our defenses, perverse habits, and self-delusions, removing “what hid Christ” so he can be seen. Continue Reading »
These books deserve more widespread, in-depth attention. Continue Reading »
Sightless in morning fog,she laces fallen fibers of fan palm, bunchgrass,the birch’s lost twigs, spins an empty creation.Conifer needles, the fox’s hair round out the void,what was cast off and left for dead now the dwelling,twined with stippled space of eggs to come, primevalpoint of departure, . . . . Continue Reading »
Christianity is an affair of things. The things we see and touch and smell are bearers of the living Christ over time. As inspiring and edifying as the works of great artists are—Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, . . . . Continue Reading »
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