poetry

In “Enduring Freedom,” Brian Volck brings us to war-torn Afghanistan, where a mother sees “evidence of things unhoped for: an arm, half a foot, an ear.”

In “The Canyon, Age 8,” the poet Timothy E. G. Bartel describes a certain coming-of-age brush with a minor sin, one that leaves him “tasting his new words.”

In “O For a Thousand Tongues to Mutter,” Jennifer Strange tracks traces of corruption—a fallen soldier’s body, a swarm of ravenous ants—in the “pale business” of our passage “in and out of life.”

In Luci Shaw’s “Hate Invasion,” anxieties, like crows, “clot” and “colonize” the mind and heart of the poet, who longs for divine answers to earth’s evils.

Allison Backous interviews the poet Christian Wiman about his work, his attention to lament and evil, and his perspective concerning the role of spirituality in contemporary American poetry.

There are those whom you would describe as enthusiastic, and then there is L.L. Barkat. She has an energy and laugh that is absolutely contagious. And some of her ideas are contagious, too! Mediation staff writer Thomas Turner chatted briefly with L.L. Barkat on the subject of digital publishing and electronic media, something she knows […]

Editor’s Note: If you missed Part One of Ryan Harper’s article, click here. Louise Glück’s call for poets to embrace open-endedness are not new. She writes in the spirit of the great American poets of contingency—Walt Whitman, Charles Olson, and A. R. Ammons, to name a few. Although this tradition resonates with me, historically it […]

Ryan Harper muses on whether evangelicalism as we know it is hospitable to the poetic discipline.

Read part one of our interview, plus two more of John Leax’s poems (and audio) here. An elder statesman in art and faith circles, John Leax (Jack to friends) is a poet and essayist of hard-earned, humble wisdom, and as such, he avoids the spotlight. The author of books like Country Labors: Poems for All […]