Survival Is a Style: Poems

Description

Named as a 2020 Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement Survival Is a Style, Christian Wiman’s first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet’s father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary. Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature. Title Page Copyright Notice Dedication Prologue I Survival Is a Style To Eat the Awful While You Starve Your Awe Drive, 1982 Summer River Rosie Dam Eating Grapes Downward Whatever the Birds Were Fragment of a Lost Scripture Spirits Gift All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs One Love 1. Sundays at Smilow 2. A Dusk 3. All You Shining Stars Baloney Land’s End Doing Lines at the Cocktail Party Good Lord the Light Poem Ending with a Sentence from Jacques Maritain I Don’t Want to Be a Spice Store II Watermelon Heaven A McDonald’s in Middle America The Sound Two Drinking Songs 1. Up with a Twist 2. Neat Ten Distillations A Heresy Assembly And Someone Wrote It Down The Priest at the Pool Party A Sketch Death Will Have to Be Careful Here How Fun When Young Something of the Sky Mild Dry Lines: An Exchange Ah, Ego III The Parable of Perfect Silence IV Fifty Even Bees Know What Zero Is Faculty Meeting, Divinity School Raccoon Problem “Meaning Is Not Man’s Gift to Reality” “We Pray God to be Free of God” Maundersong Dancing with the Ding an sich A Light Store in the Bowery Flight Never Heaven After a Lecture with My Love Joy Epilogue Notes Acknowledgments Also by Christian Wiman A Note About the Author Newsletter Sign-up Copyright