A poet, Christle is pleasingly roving and idiosyncratic as she assembles and parses, ponders and distills the science of tears, the length of a cry, Sylvia Plath, elephant emotions, Ovid, Kent State, Ross Gay, Silas Mitchell, and the Bas Jan Ader film, I’m Too Sad to Tell You (among other things) into miniature packets of white-space interrupted prose.

When my mother was still alive, one of the stories she used to tell was about the role of Catholics in the desegregation of my Mississippi Delta hometown during the 1960s. One white priest, a “Father Love,” she said, had come to town to be in residence at St. Francis, the “black Catholic church,” and…

  O you who want to slaughter us, we’ll be dead soon enough what’s the rush / and this is our only world. / Now bring me a souvenir from the desecrated city, / something tender, something that might bloom. Poet Deborah Landau closes her collection Soft Targets with this devastating couplet, the cry of…

“What do we do with that ‘little circle of experience,’ the reader of both books is left to ask herself? What do we make of the task of being planted here, in these bodies of bare bone and fragile skin, in the forever–between space that separates the earthly and the divine?”

The cell phone on the conference room table in London buzzed in the middle of the meeting, and the man glanced down at it, mid conversation. “My God,” he said. “They’ve arrested Assange.” A block away, at the Palace of Westminister, protesters on the sidewalk held signs either for or against Brexit: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!…

“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?…

If you want to be submerged in the depths of Jewish spirituality, this is the book to read: Love Nailed to the Doorpost, by Richard Chess. No, not “read”: at least not “read” in the way you would read an email or a newspaper or a novel. The poems and prose-poems collected in this book…

The writers and artists in our pages are interesting folks with interesting reading lives. So we asked the contributors in Image’s current issue: what have you read, seen, or listened to lately that you would recommend to our readers? They did not disappoint. (Read yesterday’s picks here.) Want more Contributor Picks? Find more in our free review…

The writers and artists in our pages are interesting folks with interesting reading lives. So we asked the contributors in Image’s current issue: what have you read, seen, or listened to lately that you would recommend to our readers? They did not disappoint.  Want more Contributor Picks? Find more in our free review and curation service,…

Every week, the Image staff curates a digital dispatch of compelling new books, music, artwork, and more, with personal recommendations, links from around the web, and a community message board with calls for art and job postings (not to mention exclusive access to Image discounts and VIP workshop registration!). We deliver these dispatches from the…