dumbfoundry

Then I read Christian Wiman's essay, "The Limit," and, to borrow Wiman's phrase below, it woke me up. It begins: "I was fifteen when my best friend John shot his father in the face." His story of growing up in West Texas, and his friend's hunting accident that only chance prevented from being his own, was lean and tense, and it made suffering through the rest of the anthology worth it. As soon as I reached the end, I went back to the beginning to read it again. The essay is included in his 2008 collection Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, and the rest of it is as good as "The Limit." He manages to write about faith while maintaining intellectual integrity and his dry wit keeps his essays on poetics and philosophy from slipping into a heavy handed dullness.

This entry was posted by Ivy on Monday, March 02, 2009 at 10:49 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.