More on: reading

I wanted to break down part of the Gospel story. As I see it, it’s not just about the son sacrificing himself and all those dynamics that inform the biography. I wanted to look at the messages in the Gospels that haunt our lives. What would we do in this world with someone who could perform miracles—verifiable, right-in-front-of-your-eyes miracles? It would just blow the top off the joint. But at the same time, I’m sure we’d find some way to commodify it.

YOU MIGHT BE AT A DISTANCE from your life. As always: an ordinary state, banal. Your body headed straight for the abyss, with the forward momentum of age. And beneath the freshness of blood there is weakness, ashes. Nostalgia: the soul. Sick, yes. Without a doubt: sick. And the real name of that sickness would be…

IN A SCENE from book 4 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve talk one evening of the glories of Eden and their unmerited free creation by God, unaware that they are being watched by Satan. This little scene takes place shortly after Satan’s shape-shifting arrival in Eden and serves as a kind of foreshadowing…

Li-Young Lee’s books of poetry include Rose (1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was a Lamont Poetry Selection; Book of My Nights (2001), which won the William Carlos Williams Award; From Blossoms: Selected Poems (2007), and Behind My Eyes (2008). His other work…

The road takes you from there to here. Here is where you are. Time takes you from then to now. Now is what you have. Language takes you from what you have to what you have to say. When we meet, this is your gift. And writing takes you from what you have to say…