Issue 51 | Fall 2006
A conversation with Franz Wright; Patricia C. Pongracz on the urban photography of Larry Racioppo; Sister Wendy Beckett looks at Jila Peacock’s Ten Poems from Hafez; and Andrew Hudgins finds consolation in comedy. With poems by Philip Levine, Amy McCann, and Brett Foster; fiction by Diane Glancy and Lorraine López; and more
Editorial Statement
Gregory Wolfe, Keeping a Private Address
Fiction
Diane Glancy, The Man Who Said Yellow
Kelcey Parker, Ithaca
Lorraine M. López, Human Services
Poetry
Philip Levine, A Death in Sicily
Zero Does Lear
Jeffrey Harrison, Visitation Rights
Timothy Kelly, Body as Temple
Fast
Amy McCann, Winter Song
The Traveler to His Wife
Brett Foster, Intercession: For My Daughter
The First Request of Lazarus
Nicholas Samaras, Angel of Elegy
The Distant, Watery Globe
Lisa Williams, At the Church of Santa Maria Novella
At the Church of San Crisogono
Fleda Brown, Poverty of Spirit
Ode to the Buffman Brothers
Visual Arts
Patricia C. Pongracz, The Word on the Street: The Photographs of Larry Racioppo
Sister Wendy Beckett, The Intoxicating Eye: On Looking at Jila Peacock's Ten Poems from Hafez
Interview
Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, A Conversation with Franz Wright
Essays
Todd Shy, Recovering Evangelical: Reflections of an Erstwhile Christ Addict
Confessions
Andrew Hudgins, Gladly, the Cross-eyed Bear: The Consolation of Comedy
Book Review
D.S. Martin, Margaret Avison's Momentary Dark
Sister Wendy Beckett is a well-loved art historian. The author of many books and the recipient of numerous awards, Sister Wendy is perhaps best known for her filmed tours of the world’s art museums, aired on BBC and PBS. She has roots in South Africa and Scotland, a degree from Oxford, and currently lives at a Carmelite monastery in England.
Fleda Brown’s most recent collection of poems is The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (Carnegie-Mellon). She is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and poet laureate of Delaware.
Brett Foster is an assistant professor at Wheaton College, where he teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature. He has held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and recently completed his doctorate in English at Yale University. His work has appeared in Agni,Boston Review, Christian Century, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Mars Hill Review, Missouri Review, Partisan Review, and Poetry International.
Diane Glancy is a professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she taught Native American literature and creative writing. She is now on a four-year sabbatical/early retirement program. Her most recent books are Rooms: New and Selected Poems (Salt); the essay collection In-between Places (Arizona); and The Dance Partner, a collection of stories (Michigan State).
Jeffrey Harrison’s fourth book of poems, Incomplete Knowledge, will be published by Four Way Books this fall. He is also the author of The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems, published by Waywiser Press in England last spring, and a chapbook, An Undertaking(Haven Street).
Andrew Hudgins is an advisory editor for Image. His books include the poetry collectionsThe Never-Ending (a National Book Award finalist), After the Lost War (winner of the Poets’ Prize), Saints and Strangers (a Pulitzer finalist), and Babylon in a Jar (all from Houghton Mifflin), and the essay collection The Glass Anvil (Michigan). He is Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at Ohio State University.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, in the former Soviet Union, and arrived in this country in 1993 with his family. His poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo), won the Whiting Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and was named best book of the year by Foreword Magazine. He teaches at San Diego State University.
Timothy Kelly lives in Olympia, Washington, where he teaches creative writing at the Evergreen State College and is a practicing physical therapist. His books include Articulation(Lynx House) and Stronger (Oberlin). His chapbook Toccata & Fugue won the 2005 Floating Bridge Chapbook competition and appeared last year.
Philip Levine divides his time between Fresno, California, and Brooklyn, New York. His collections include What Work Is, winner of a National Book Award, and The Simple Truth, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize (both from Knopf). His most recent book, Breath, was published by Knopf in 2004. He is presently the Distinguished Visiting Poet at New York University.
Lorraine M. López has stories published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazy Horse, Jabberwock Review, and Cimarron Review. Her books include Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories and the young-adult novel Call Me Henri (both from Curbstone). A new novel, The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters, will be published by Warner Books in 2007.
D.S. Martin is a Canadian whose poetry has appeared in many journals, including Arc, 6, Christian Century, The Cresset, Crux, Mars Hill Review, and Rock & Sling. He is also the music critic for Christian Week. His interview with Margaret Avison appeared in Image issue 45.
Amy McCann received her MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University in 2004 and currently teaches writing at Northwestern College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Third Coast, Puerto del Sol, Hotel Amerika, New Letters, Mars Hill Review, Rock & Sling, and others.
Kelcey Parker’s fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, Sycamore Review, Epiphany, and other journals. She has a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Indiana University South Bend.
Patricia C. Pongracz is curator-at-large at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York City, formerly the Gallery at the American Bible Society, where she has worked for seven years. In addition to the Larry Racioppo catalogue excerpted in this issue, she co-authored the art bookThe Next Generation: Contemporary Expressions of Faith (Eerdmans) and edited the forthcoming Biblical Art and the Asian Imagination (mobia). She also writes about stained glass.
Nicholas Samaras won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for Hands of the Saddlemaker (Yale). He has recently completed two manuscripts, “Simko,” based on the life of the Slovakian poet and translator Daniel Simko, and “The Lost City of Pekin,” a memoir.
Todd Shy holds degrees from the University of Virginia and Princeton Theological Seminary. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Christian Century, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Ontario Review, The Raleigh News and Observer, and is forthcoming in Salmagundi.
Katherine Towler is author of the novels Snow Island and Evening Ferry (both from MacAdam/Cage). The recipient of an arts fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, she teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University.
Lisa Williams’s first book of poems, The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State), won the May Swenson Poetry Award. She has also received the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award, an Elliston Fellowship, a Henry Hoyns Fellowship, and a Rome Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in the Southern Review,Raritan, Measure, Southwest Review, Bat City Review, Salmagundi, Virginia Quarterly Review, Literary Imagination, and other journals.