Though she was raised Catholic and a formative book in her childhood was an illustrated Lives of the Saints, Anne Carson does not have much time for the institutional church.
Poetry
Posted inPoetry
For Martha, Last Passenger Pigeon, 1914
Where in the spirit world/ have you taken up lodging
Posted inPoetry
The World Gives My Mother Back to Me
she’d pull this red dress from the rack/ (where I will leave it), and bear it home/ to me because I wear too much black.
Posted inPoetry
Works both familiar and surprising: America’s Fall poetry roundup
In this roundup of poetry from the past year, ‘America’ editors and staff explore worlds of verse and fragments of reality that enchant and unsettle.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
Annie Dillard: Our 20th-century Thoreau, nature writer and theologian
Annie Dillard on converting to Catholicism: “You go to a Catholic church, and there are people of all different colors and ages, and babies squalling. You’re taking a stand with these people. You’re saying: ‘Here I am. One of the people who love God.’”
Posted inPoetry
In Times That Trouble
Though riverbeds might buckle, breaching wide, I will not murmur. No, I will hold true.
Posted inBooks
Review: Rebecca Gayle Howell revisits the Book of Genesis
Rebecca Gayle Howell’s project in ‘Erase Gensis’ seems to exist in the tradition of midrash—the shaping of Scripture in light of contemporary concerns and creative interpretation.
Posted inShort Take
The three great loves of Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry fleshed out a picture of America in which people put down roots, commit themselves to each other and love the ground they stand on.
Posted inPoetry
Liturgy in the Glow
I imagine the algorithms
as monks in long habits,
praying at impossible speed,
