Epistle to the Ostensible Church
By Poetry Issue 113
That we are all adopted, appallingly / co-opted into Christ’s holiness is
a simple given, and a certainty. / So relax.
Be Thou My Vision:
Witness to the Revelation
By Essay Issue 96
I WAS RAISED IN A FAMILY for whom our Baptist church was very much an extension of our home. While that church was—as I might now parse such matters—a particularly cranky Baptist church, it offered nonetheless a loving community to those within it. More importantly, that community offered me a first taste of what I…
Read MoreTempest
By Poetry Issue 93
Paul Mazursky, director (1982) Kalibanos welcomes you to his comfy cave, and if the Sony Trinitron proves defective so too does the illusion that you had slipped free from the world and its ubiquitous corruptions, that you could simply say you would no longer play the soul-eroding role of mute, complicit slave. Many frames will…
Read MoreSweet Life
By Poetry Issue 93
La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini (1960) In a frame or two, Marcello will turn away, finally having failed to hear her voice, the angelic girl beckoning from across the estuary’s rift in the beach, etching in the sand the divide between his world and her world. Behind him, in that flat expanse to which he…
Read MoreWhich I is I?
By Book Review Issue 82
Three Poetry Collections Idiot Psalms by Scott Cairns (Paraclete Press, 2014) Seam by Tarfia Faizullah (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013) F by Franz Wright (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) IN THE LONG HISTORY of the poetry of religious devotion, one often encounters a guileless representation of the self in its attempts to relate to the divine. The…
Read MoreNothing
By Poetry Issue 60
…no evil thing is evil insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is turned… —Saint Gregory Palamás What had I meant to say? Just now. I have forgotten. Which among the extant flourishing phenomena are you? Is that a limp? The evening drifts into its routine dimming of particulars, quite literally evening the scene…
Read MoreWeb Exclusive: A Conversation with Scott Cairns
By Interview Issue 68
The current issue of Image features three new poems by Scott Cairns. The author of numerous volumes of poetry, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, and a longtime contributor to Image, Scott has often advocated what he calls a “sacramental poetics”—the idea that a poem should not so much describe something as dosomething. Image: Your poems use an exacting, prophetic voice, but…
Read MoreAnother Idiot Psalm
By Poetry Issue 68
by these and countless other dear / impediments, I stoop to find / my knees
Read MoreAnother Idiot Psalm: We Say Flight
By Poetry Issue 68
We say flight of the imagination, but stand ankle-deep in silt. We say deep life of the mind, but seal the stone to keep the tomb untouched, O Stillness. Nearly all we find to say we speak for the most part unawares, what little bit we think to say unmoved, O Great Enormity Unmoved. Brief…
Read MoreLenten Complaint
By Poetry Issue 68
The breakfast was adequate, the fast itself sub-par. We gluttons, having modified our habits only somewhat within the looming Lenten dark, failed quite to shake our thick despair, an air that clamped the heart, made moot the prayer. Wipe your chin. I’m dying here in Omaha, amid the flat, surrounded by the beefy, land-locked generations,…
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