Christian Wiman’s feel-bad memoir

I’m no physicist, but I understand this much about how things work: when a person is leaning against a wall, the wall is paramount. If it crumbles, she will collapse along with it. Well, when a poet writes Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair, the despair is paramount. The despair is the point—the fulcrum upon which everything elegantly balances.

Christian Wiman’s new book does not, as I wrongfully suspected, have much in common with Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. Although both men are poets who embrace short-form prose, it turns out that writing against despair is a far cry from writing for delight. Likewise, Wiman’s new book does not, as I also wrongfully suspected, have much in common with his previous memoir, My Bright Abyss. Zero at the Bone may have its own share of abysses, but few of them are bright.

Still, Wiman opposes the encroaching shadow with all of his strength and with all of his words. What else can one really expect from a writer who, in the first entry, admits that he finds faith to be “an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant [he] recognize[s] it as such, an agony of absence that assaults [him] like a psychic wound”? Or who later admits, “I don’t know how to talk about suffering without talking about God,” even though he also admits that he is “tired of talking about God.”