A Lumbee friend described her mother’s relationship to family, from the vantage of her matrilineal world, as being like a door. The very word starts opening them. From door we are all too quick to rush to gatekeeper; our western and colonial habits of mind favor such things as the defense of property, watchmen along…

“Glosa” refers to an invented language created as a way for all the world’s speakers to understand each other.

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…

This month I thought it would be a good idea to take four hours of Arabic every week and an intensive JavaScript course all while working full-time. I was nervous about the Arabic, scared that I wouldn’t remember how to read or speak politely after three years away from formal lessons, but strangely, it came…

Here’s your assignment. Choose a poem you’ve written (it could be any piece of writing, really, an email message, a shopping list, a complaint to a cable service provider, a toast for a wedding—you get the idea. If it’s a poem, chose only a few lines. If it’s another piece of writing, choose a portion…

The commandment to love is nailed to my doorpost. Ritualistically written on a little piece of parchment, rolled up, tucked inside a beautifully painted ceramic case, and nailed aslant to the doorpost. I almost never notice it. Not when I’m rushing out of the house in the morning, book bag and gym bag slung over…

What is poetry, anyway? I found myself musing about this as I sat with John Slater’s stimulating new collection, Lean. First I recalled what I’d once heard poet Li-Young Lee say at a reading: In poetry, language is not the only medium; silence is also a medium. This is a difference of poetry from prose.…

A few weeks back, the news related a story that a confederate veteran killed at Shiloh and buried under the wrong name for one hundred fifty-four years will now have that mistake rectified. Augustus Beckmann was buried under the name “A. Bergman” at Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery in Columbus, Ohio. The descendants of the German…

There’s a sub-genre of poetry in which the speaker’s persona is a long-ago figure or a fictional character. Here, in “Translation Back into Native Tongues,” the speaker is John of Patmos, purported author of the biblical Book of Revelation. His subject in this poem is language, languages: always a perfect subject for poetry, that prime…

The following appears as the editorial statement in Image issue 88. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is…