Martha Serpas’s poem “Asperges” is a procession of what seems ordinary: summer rain falling like holy water on the altar of a hospital door, water washing a new-born baby in a nurse’s sink, the surprise of getting “dolloped in the eye and (laughing) away / the shame of believing / in any kind of redemptive…

Psalm of David by Shigeru Aoki, 1906 (Public Domain) Nicholas Samaras’s poetry has always struck me as being unbelievably rich, something that is carefully sculpted and also organic, unyielding and true. It is a psalmist’s voice, and in “A Psalm to the Mansions of Heaven,” we hear a sort of ascent, a calling out to…

This post originally appeared at Good Letters on May 9, 2012. Dayne, my mother’s ex-boyfriend, spent his childhood in Tennessee, where he got his southern drawl and where his father, who drank, would stomp through the house and sweep his long arm across the crowded kitchen counter smashing greasy dishes onto the linoleum. It was…

I am boarding a plane to Detroit, and so is she, her thick coat falling onto my lap from the center aisle, the smell of smoke thick enough to make my head swim. She shoves the coat under her seat, her thick gray hair brushing my arm as she sits. “I’m Dianne,” she tells me,…

My wedding and a move from Michigan to Wyoming have filled my summer with enough checklists and tasks to keep me running around until one in the morning, until I finally put myself to bed, the set of tomorrow’s tasks stuttering in my ear while I try to sleep.

I have spent my whole life as a writer trying to string together these kinds of moments. Moments when the veil has been slit open, when I have been able to catch a glimpse of how God has held my life together.

Dayne, my mother’s ex-boyfriend, spent his childhood in Tennessee, where he got his southern drawl and where his father, who drank, would stomp through the house and sweep his long arm across the crowded kitchen counter smashing greasy dishes onto the linoleum. It was a habit that followed their family on the move to Sauk…

So knowing, what is known? …that some are born and some are brought to the glory of this world. —Lucille Clifton, “Far Memory” This weekend, my younger sister is taking a train to Grand Rapids. She is coming to help me with details: to try on shoes and seal envelopes, to shake out the ivory…

My mother lives in a little yellow house on John Street in Whiting, Indiana, where the Chicago skyline looms across the northern edge of town, where British Petroleum’s refining towers, which flank the town’s southern edge, burn both night and day, their white eyes flaming through the rain that has made me late for my…

In college, I encountered some lines from Gregory Wolfe about the vocation of the artist. As someone who had been carrying the desire to write, and the desire to make this writing my life work, the words were perfect. “Vocation,” Greg wrote, “is a mysterious thing. It seems to come to us both from without—as a call…