Named as a 2020 Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement Survival Is a Style, Christian Wiman's first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet's father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary. Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

I.Survival is StyleTo Eat the Awful While you Starve the AweDrive, 1982Summer River Rosie DamEating Grapes DownwardWhatever the Birds WereFragment of A Lost ScriptureSpiritsAll My Friends Are Finding New BeliefsOne Love1. Sundays at Smilow 2. A Dusk3. All You Shining StarsBaloneyLand's EndDoing Lines at the Cocktail PartyGood Lord the LightPoem Ending with A Sentence from Jacques MaritainI Don't Want to be A Spice StoreII.Watermelon HeavenA McDonald's in Middle AmericaThe SoundTwo Drinking Songs1. Up with a Twist2. NeatTen DistillationsA HeresyAssemblyAnd Someone Wrote it DownThe Priest at the Pool PartyA SketchDeath Will Have to be Careful HereHow Fun When YoungSomething of the SkyMild Dry Lines: An ExchangeAh, EgoIII.The Parable of Perfect SilenceIV.FiftyEven Bees Know What Zero IsFaculty Meeting, Divinity SchoolRaccoon Problem"Meaning is not Man's Gift to Reality""We Pray God to be Free of God"MaundersongDancing with the Ding An SichA Light Store in the BoweryFlightNever HeavenAfter a Lecture with My LoveJoyEpilogueNotesAcknowledgments