More on: work

ONE OF THE STRANGER CONVERSATIONS I’ve ever had took place during my senior year of college. I was attending a conference, and during one of the coffee breaks I was talking with a scholar who had taken a shine to me. He asked if I was considering doing a PhD, and if so, in what…

__________The poet is in labor.    ______________—Denise Levertov   _______I confess the obvious, my inadequacy to translate famine to bread to feed all the hungry children on earth. Wish I could invent a happiness machine or dollar tree blossoming with nontaxable revenue for small businesses. Wish for a thousand bitcoins, wild doves of aqueous tongues,…

i In the eyes of Dürer’s Saint Jerome, desert inhabits the dark flecks of his downward gaze. It harrowed him. He came back clean as picked bone. Chalcis of sunlight, and sand— only in the eyes can days be counted, days of muscle wasting, in which desire dwindled to the body’s dry growl. He’s written…

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…

IT HAPPENED FOR ME in seventh-grade English class. My teacher, Mr. Taussig, was an older gentleman. He had driven a tank in the Battle of the Bulge, which feat of courage helped to offset the fact that he looked like Mr. Magoo. For many months he dragged us line by line through Shakespeare’s Romeo and…

I’M WAITING for the 6:40 am train to take me to Boston. It’s a forty-five minute ride that I use to read “inspirational” works. What’s inspirational? Anything that helps get me through the day with some kind of inner peace, with a sense that what I’m doing is worthwhile. I take a deep breath as…

You, who seek grace from a distracted God, you, who parse the rhetoric of empire, who know in your guts what it is but don’t know what to call it, you, good son of a race of shadows— your great fortune is to have a job, never ate government cheese, federal peanut butter— you, jerked…

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…

IN THE CAR ON THE WAY to the Grosses’ my wife says, “I’m just hoping we can get to know some of these people. Like really get to know them.” I nod and she goes on, “And I don’t mean like they are projects, like we are just trying to save them.” I agree with her.…