A Conversation with Julia Spicher Kasdorf
By Interview Issue 79
Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of three poetry collections—Sleeping Preacher (1992), Eve’s Striptease (1998), and Poetry in America (2011)—all from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Sleeping Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing, and Eve’s Striptease was named one of the top twenty poetry books of 1998 by Library Journal. She has…
Read MoreForward into the Dark
By Essay Issue 80
Forward into the Dark: Twenty-Five Years of Ambition IN “THE IRRATIONAL ELEMENT IN POETRY,” Wallace Stevens explains that the unknown “excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom…. [W]e may resent the consideration of [the unknown] by any except the most lucid minds; but when so considered,…
Read MoreA Conversation with Rowan Williams
By Interview Issue 80
Rowan Douglas Williams was born in Swansea, south Wales, in 1950, into a Welsh-speaking family, and was educated at Dynevor School in Swansea and Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he studied theology. After two years as a lecturer at the College of the Resurrection, near Leeds, he was ordained deacon in Ely Cathedral before returning to…
Read MoreWhat Now?
By Essay Issue 80
The Road Behind Us Image’s Founding Generation When Image was founded in 1989, the cultural landscape looked different than it does today. Religious writers and artists felt cold-shouldered in the public square and often ill at ease within the church. The need for a journal that demonstrated the continuing vitality of contemporary art informed by…
Read MoreBeginnings Again
By Poetry Issue 84
A silver thread pierces my hand, Gleams in lamplight, my fingers flexing there, The needle plunging into bleeding skin, Making a high-pitched, silver sound Becoming words shining in the flame that they create. Tarnished words converge into beginnings, Flame and words, beginnings In moonlight, fairy rings, clouds across the sky Entering a sentence that began…
Read MoreVerbum: A Rhapsody
By Poetry Issue 84
Word lived in solitude. Walked the dog before dawn. Coffee on the patio. The air was thin. There were no stars. Silence drifted from the river with the mist. Word wandered through the house, looked out the window. Could the darkness speak, what would it say? What would Word answer? Word took a deep breath,…
Read MoreThe Reclusive Novel: Community, Tradition, and Loneliness
By Book Review Issue 83
Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers (Knopf, 2014) High as the Horses’ Bridles by Scott Cheshire (Henry Holt and Co, 2014) THE WORLD HAS TURNED SMALL in our hands.…
Read MorePsalm for the Lost
By Poetry Issue 83
Down the dark way, the dark way down. Everything dark now, as he has come to see: that the way was always dark, the journey dark, the mind dark, the answers like the questions dark, each day dark, the glaucous pearl white eyes, even when the sun spread across the greengold grass, glistening the bright…
Read MoreSyllable Nutshell
By Poetry Issue 83
G is for onset, kickoff, square one, raging beginning of in the beginning out of the starting gate, raw originality in original sense, and if consonantal sine qua non for vanity plates. O is for nucleus, sonorous meat in a syllable sandwich, bellybutton earful, always a vowel, animal imperative enough in itself to tell the…
Read MoreAnti-poetics
By Poetry Issue 83
When everything has left you, at the end, the world will come down to a few old words you will see new because you’ve chosen to. Your last breath will be like my first today. So I start here, in that extremity— or is it just simplicity I’ve earned by learning to be, the page…
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