Issue 78

The art of Steve Prince is explored in an essay by Beth McCoy in Image issue 78. Prince, a New Orleans native, works primarily in printmaking and drawing. His richly textured images are steeped in religious and visual culture; critic D. Eric Bookhardt characterizes their metaphorical power as “an ability to elucidate inexplicable worlds within…

For the word is living and active …………—Hebrews 4:12 Irene, a girl’s name. Irenology. Studies in peace. How does peace circulate? Open in Ezra and paging to Nehemiah, ——–I contemplate exiles rebuilding temple walls. I thought, is this a form of peace studies? Confess our sins. Our inability to perform ——-a divinely ordained task by…

Blessed Are Those Who Yearn New Poetry in Review The Glacier’s Wake by Katy Didden (Pleiades Press, 2013) God Loves You by Kathryn Maris (Seren Books UK, 2013) Incarnadine by Mary Szybist (Graywolf Press, 2013)   AT THE END of Paradiso, Dante, after confessing his inability to describe the vision of Love he sees, nonetheless…

An old man was dying in the hospital, —-my friend the doctor told me. He was eighty-nine, his whole life a tailor in a shop —-below the room where he was born. He had no one, so a kind aide from Ghana —-sat with him, one hand in his the other holding her sandwich. The…

The following is a chapter in Richard Rodriguez’s new memoir, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, forthcoming this October from Viking.   GOD formed you of dust from the soil. I was a sort of an afterthought. A wishbone. He blew into our nostrils the breath of life and there we were. You were his Darling Boy…

New York At noon precisely, just as the bells began to ring, the white peacock in the garden of Saint John the Divine spread its glorious tail, making a rippling many-splendored sound, like a sibilant wind rushing through many leaves. The tips of its feathers, shaped like tiny V’s, reminded me of doves descending, the…

All his lighthouses are self-portraits…. ————Jo Hopper on Edward Hopper   Darkness. Darkness & a wild crashing & smashing of waves on the rocks below. My light swinging round & round—shining for a split second on shards of rocky coast & a vast oily blackness ready to swallow small craft & large. I preside over…

Robert Clark was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He received a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in medieval studies from the University of London. He is the author of ten books, both fiction and nonfiction. Clark’s first collection of personal essays, My Grandfather’s House, was a finalist for…

Today                                       just today is a forgiveness exercise.               I try to live as though yesterday has no hold on me.                    …

Going through the experience of Hurricane Katrina taught me to submit to and praise God. The message I got is that we are hopeless, but we still thanked God in the midst of it. Some people can’t fathom how to sing and praise him in the midst of Katrina. That is where I pulled all…