Issue 97

IN FALL OF 2016 I RETURNED TO THE CLASSROOM, filling in for a friend who was on sabbatical. The course was a seminar for art students, one that I had taught many times before I retired. My friend had used Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev as one of the texts, just as I…

IMAGE HAS ALWAYS embraced the idea that art often speaks better than argument, and that seems especially true in times of grief. For this issue, we’ve chosen to print a poem rather than a traditional editorial. As the Image board and staff search for a new editor, we and our community are in a state…

Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) The Book of Endings, Leslie Harrison (University of Akron Press, 2017) In the Language of My Captor, Shane McCrae (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) WHAT CAN POETRY DO that other genres cannot? What makes it unique among the arts? What territory, however small, can poetry…

YOU WERE HOLDING THE BEEF DIP you had brought to the vegetarian potluck when I met you. The potluck was the lunch hour of the day-long birthing class at our midwife’s cabin. Through the large window behind the kitchen sink I saw the snow falling heavy and wet on the woods behind her home. I…

WE WATCHED DAVID make his way slowly down the middle of the street, dragging his right leg, his right arm limp at his side. With his left hand, he reached forward with his cane and lurched after it. A plastic grocery bag hung from his left wrist. Step and drag, forward and pause, all effort…

Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest, teacher, and author of thirteen books, among them the memoir Leaving Church and the New York Times–bestselling Learning to Walk in the Dark. From 1998 until her retirement last year, Taylor held an endowed chair in religion and philosophy at Piedmont College. She has also served on the…

By dint of going wrong all will come right.                     —proverb ° Where outside the mind is this place like mind, unmappable, this un-, this ir-, this sub-? What coffin text— honeycombs, laurel sprigs, lyres, among syllabograms—chiseled here with ouroboros and zero glyphs for eternal reading…

Little monotony, crow come to my window, why start my day with your cracked, raucous notes? You know the kind of music you profess unasked for works its way into my bones, shakes me as only thunderheads’ bleak rain unsettles me, insisting on a correspondence. I have to reach far down into my distances, my…

“I’m not the kind of heaven you thought you’d find,” the sky said, spreading itself across the floor here, in the kitchen, its gold leaf freaked and split as it appeared and disappeared and stained the morning with its radiance. —————————-“And furthermore, you’re not my idea of a prophet or a sage. But here we…