Survival Is a Style: Poems

by Christian Wiman

Overview

Acclaimed Poet Christian Wiman's Most Powerful Collection Yet

Survival Is a Style, Christian Wiman's first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. Named as a 2020 Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement, this stunning work showcases Wiman's signature blend of musical and formal variety, with a voice that shifts seamlessly from tender and funny to fiercely mystical and savagely skeptical.

In this extraordinary collection, readers will encounter moving elegies, sharp observations on modern American life, and expansive poems that deftly merge different modes of speech and thought. Wiman's spiritual and religious insights are on full display, as he grapples with questions of God, faith, and the human experience in the twenty-first century.

With its profound depth and range, Survival Is a Style solidifies Christian Wiman's place as one of the most vital voices in contemporary American poetry. This is a collection destined to become a permanent part of the American literary landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374721411
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/04/2020
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	489 KB

About the Author

Christian Wiman is the author of several books, including two memoirs, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (FSG, 2013) and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (FSG, 2018); Every Riven Thing (FSG, 2010), winner of the Ambassador Book Award in poetry; Once in the West (FSG, 2014), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in poetry; and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. He teaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.
Christian Wiman is the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including two memoirs, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art; Every Riven Thing, winner of the Ambassador Book Award; Once in the West, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and Survival Is a Style—all published by FSG. He teaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and at Yale Divinity School.

Table of Contents

I.
Survival is Style
To Eat the Awful While you Starve the Awe
Drive, 1982
Summer River Rosie Dam
Eating Grapes Downward
Whatever the Birds Were
Fragment of A Lost Scripture
Spirits
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

Editorial Reviews

"Wiman’s greatest asset is his taste for simplicity . . . But these simple melodies are not without deep resonance and even occasional dissonance, as themes of spiritual doubt and physical illness recur throughout the book’s four sections . . . So thoroughly charmed was I that I failed to notice I had boarded the wrong train, hopping off just before it tore out of Manhattan—though I would have indeed welcomed a moment more in Wiman’s musical company." —Elinor Hitt, The Paris Review

"In this new collection, his poetry takes us, once more, on a metaphysical trip through the essential ‘aloneness’ of Being and its endless manifestations. Wiman’s art is concerned with holding mirrors up to our (seemingly) godless existence, searching for hidden divinity in everyday reflections . . . there is great virtuosity and variance of subject to be found within — but above all it is a struggle, a struggle for faith, for understanding, and for acceptance." —Ryan Asmussen, Chicago Review of Books

"This slim book of poems reads as if it were the husk of a magnificent novel. This is partly the effect of Wiman’s style, which has deepened—allowing for some of the lighter touches that admirers of his memoirs will recognize . . . Wiman accomplishes a single narrative arc through the idiosyncrasies of a poetry that will always honor the word over the message. That word is mortal, its survival a style." —Arthur Willemse, World Literature Today

"[Survival Is a Style] rings with hard-wrung truths . . . These poems, which vary widely in their forms, are held together by the poet’s sensibility, each word sparking joy in its sound and texture . . . Wrestling with the self, skepticism, and faith, this collection is a radiant addition to Wiman’s oeuvre." —Publishers Weekly

"The collection’s title yokes Wiman’s directness and aloofness together; the phrase is declarative and whimsical, hard-won and smirk-worthy, provocative and requires a double-take . . . Perhaps the tricks of metaphor such as irony and smoke of artifice have no place in the poetic scene Wiman establishes. He wants a starker sense of verse which makes the description of the clothing all the more ridiculous. Bared humanity we all recognize will survive." —Spencer Reece, The Kenyon Review

"Wiman, for all his spiritual wrangling, is a poet of things, and Survival Is a Style contains some sonically sparkling poems whose raucous music defies too much quiet contemplation." —Declan Ryan, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher