More on: Jeanne Murray Walker

I think he planned it, sort of, from the start; whether he knew they’d choose the fruit or not, he scattered hints around the garden, what to do in case they got themselves kicked out. A shirt of fur around the lamb. The stream converting water into syllables. Bamboo pipes. The caps of mushrooms round…

Sister storm, hurling your javelins too near our window, don’t you care if in darkness, we splinter like a bright waterfall, if we catch fire from the sparks you send flying from the grindstone of night? You have cracked our sky with lightning; you have made glass pitchers of our bodies and poured our spirits…

Imagine someday the splurge drains out of fall. Holding a melon you know a creek of light streams inside its rough burlap ball, but if you cut it open you know stars will fall extinguished in the dark. You know the quarrel of the squeaky porch swing, know the cold that stacks goldfish like knives…

The International Issue (#65) includes poetry in translation from Russian, Latvian, Romanian, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. We asked the translators who contributed work to the issue about how they see their art: What’s the value of reading poetry in translation? That is, if we’re not really hearing the sounds and rhythms of the poet’s original…

Yes, a nameless quietness fills the frontiers within which my disgrace cries out. Maybe that’s why I tell my name to it when I wish no more we were together or when I tire of bearing myself. With my own hands maybe I’ll gather what’s left of the shiver of the aspen tree every evening.…

IT’S 103 DEGREES in Lincoln, Nebraska, and my mother is sitting at the kitchen table, twisting the elastic steel band of my father’s big watch around her wrist. She is paging through a book as massive as the New York telephone directory. It contains all of Shakespeare’s plays. The letters are the size of midges,…

 Jeanne Murray Walker is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently A Deed to the Light (University of Illinois Press) and New Tracks, Night Falling (Eerdmans). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Century, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Image, and Best American Poetry. She is also an accomplished playwright, whose scripts have been performed in theaters…

The daughter of a Tuskegee Airman and a teacher, Marilyn Nelson was brought up primarily on military bases and started writing while still in elementary school. She earned her BA from the University of California, Davis, and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (MA, 1970) and the University of Minnesota (PhD, 1979). Her…

The Word-Soaked World Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith Since 1989, Image has hosted a conversation at the nexus of art and faith among writers and artists in all forms. As the conversation has evolved, certain words have cropped up again and again: Beauty. Mystery. Presence. For this issue, we invited a handful of…

The scrambled eggs, already fried and fragrant on a plate, slip back into their shells; each smooth white egg sails toward its vagrant mother chicken, roosts in a fertile cell. The melody beats back to eighth notes which settle, dark spots on the snowy staff of bass and treble clefs, then briefly float through Bach’s…