Articles

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011) The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (Back Bay Books, 2011)   Strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention, especially when everyone is striving to unite particulars and find at least some general…

An oyster-white lily, inner walls of plaster, the stoma lit like an orange candle, the petals’ undersides like the satin trim on lingerie, or a corrugated fan. White as a cloud cornice, egg shell, whitish spiders just visible on petal-skin of nearly the same color— the description untenable, improbable to the eye, the stillness never…

My grandfather moonlighted as a rabbi on Friday evenings when he should have been praying in the Bronx one-room apartment with no electricity and the claw-foot tub used for distilling whisky— not walking down 143rd Street below the globed gaslights, along the trolley tracks, past shuttered tobacco shops and Coca-Cola signage, towards Yonkers and the…

Entering the House of Awe By Susanna Childress New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011 The Ninety-Third Name of God By Anya Krugovoy Silver Louisiana State University Press, 2010 Sky Burial By Dana Levin Copper Canyon Press, 2011   IT’S CERTAIN there is no fine thing / Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring,” writes Yeats…

Luci Shaw is attentive to balance, cultivating both an active engagement with the arts in culture and the solitude necessary to listen and catch at language. Her twelve acclaimed collections of poetry include What the Light Was Like, Harvesting Fog, and the forthcoming Slow Pleasures. Her nonfiction includes Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and…

I sing for fear I’ll hear the still small voice and not like what it says. I croon to make my skull full as a squat hive and the honey is my cracked song, my sting in the throat. O I know a bee is not a melody but I must come to terms with…

Because the crab apple tree is not incarnate, but a shape cut from sky, you simply pull its trunk a little wider and step through. Once on the other side, you turn, take stock, lean on a bough, and look back at it all. So strange to catch your own life unawares, to see your…

Stands me, though it could be any of us, sliced open, scalp to instep, en pointe in formaldehyde inside a glass case like some macabre Houdini stunt. This may be a fin-de-siècle end-of-pier show, a sicko’s private gallery, a future museum of mortality—I’d be the last to know: dutiful sentry in cross-section, everlasting witness to…

The Need EVERY COUPLE OF MONTHS,  you go to the doctor looking for a new word—a name that is different from the one you have now: hypo, hyper, metastasized, malignant, benign. The hope is always for an upgrade, though it’s hard to say which names are better than others in this game. Take benign, for…

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…