Dan Murphy has written a series of poems inspired by medieval miniatures: those marvelously detailed paintings crammed full with colorful life. In this poem, Murphy uses the miniature of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem to multiply images for our human need to reach for the beyond. I love the variety of these images: someone climbing a…

1. I was standing in the kitchen of a rental house in the middle of forty acres of woods deep in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, when I told my agent I wanted to write about the death penalty, a topic that had chased me for over a decade. I’d only recently sold my first…

­I’m trying to trust in God. My husband has had chronic fatigue and chest pain for the five years since his quadruple bypass open-heart surgery. Sometimes less discomfort, sometimes more, but always there. His various doctors have tried everything to relieve his distress…but nothing works. He is suffering, and it naturally pains me to see…

Denis Johnson died this past summer at the age of sixty-seven. Many have said that he was the single greatest writer of his generation, and the praise is warranted. Johnson, in a class with Kafka, Babel, Hamsun, and Lowry, wrote impossible novels: a dream-writer whose vision blended plain-prose with the arabesque, comedy with violence, death…

For Scott Simon, and for Bill Craven September 11, 2001 has been one of two signal public events of my adulthood. The other was the inauguration day of President Obama. The minutes and hours of each were suffused with a sense of historical moment: on one, I was a thirtyish new bride; on the other, I…

In this stirring poem by Anya Silver, the bell becomes a blueprint. First, the bell shape is transposed on her own body dangling freely in the “arc and blur” of a rope swing. Then, it becomes her open mouth and uvula. And, finally, we see the heart as a shattered peony (“unpeeling, pealing”) dropping petals…

I will not claim credit for many things, but one virtue I own is that you can’t make me disloyal to that which I’ve grown attached. Even in my youth, when it was very important to me that I like what everyone else liked, I would not detach myself from that to which I had…

Getting a tattoo is not only about deciding what to etch onto one’s body forever, but also about deciding what brief monologue will be uttered any time someone points to the ink and asks: “What does it mean?” The expectation is universal: people want something succinct, a response that suspends their judgment, an answer that…

“We’ve got five years, that’s all we’ve got,” sang Ziggy Stardust forty-five years ago. Did people feel a prickling in 1977, as if Bowie might be prophet? It’s not so hard to believe. Do people ever forget to fear burning to death once they’ve imagined burning in their beds, under their desks, in their basements?…

“Lord, let…”: this is how nearly every sentence of Nicholas Samaras’s “The Psalm of Your Face” begins. It’s our own constant plea to God: Lord, let my neighbor be healed of cancer; Lord, let my son be safe in battle. In Samaras’s poem, the pleas “Lord, let…” are first focused on God’s imagined face. But…