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When Christian Wiman was 39 years old, he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable form of lymphoma and informed that he likely had five years left to live. In the nearly two decades since, the man who has been called “the most important Christian writer in America” (The Dish) and “the best devotional poet writing in English” (Poetry) has spent much of his time living close to death — enduring multiple rounds of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, and a series of experimental drugs that have managed to extend his life, month by month by month.

Even as Wiman journeyed through an extraordinarily difficult time, life continued to pull him relentlessly forward. He became a professor of religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, where he was both challenged and energized by his students. He leaned further into his life’s calling, writing and publishing numerous books of poetry and prose. And he experienced joy, including watching his twin daughters, born in 2010, grow into teenagers who ask such questions as “Why are you a poet? I mean, why?” – excerpted from an Interview with Trinity Church, NYC

“I was led to God by joy, but led to words, you might say, by grief. It was meeting my wife that first made me—made us—want to acknowledge the love that our own seemed to imply and include. It was the threat of death that made me want to give my inchoate feelings of faith some definite form. I knew that I believed, but I didn’t really know what I believed. In My Bright Abyss, I set out to try to answer that question.”- Christian Wiman

Eight years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith―responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition―might look like.
Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, My Bright Abyss is destined to become a spiritual classic, useful not only to believers but to anyone whose experience of life and art seems at times to overbrim its boundaries. How do we answer this "burn of being"? Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives―and for our deaths―if we acknowledge the "insistent, persistent ghost" that some of us call God? – amazon.com

“Burnished and beautiful, My Bright Abyss is a sobering look at faith and poetry by a man who believes fiercely in both, but fears he might be looking at them for the last time. Wiman's memoir is innovative in its willingness to interrogate not only religious belief, but one of its most common surrogates, literature . . . Wiman's story is chiefly a love affair: of a poet with words, of a husband with his wife and two daughters, of a believer with the holy…” ―Casey N. Cep, The New Republic

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