Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

Despair is not the opposite of faith — it may be its very threshold. In Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, Christian Wiman braids poetry, memoir, theology, and criticism into a genre-defying work of rare urgency and beauty, confronting the darkness that shadows even the most examined life.

Through fifty luminous, compressed pieces, Wiman unravels despair’s seductive pull — not to dismiss it, but to move through it. The voices of Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, and Emily Dickinson join his own as he wrestles with faith, mortality, and the God who is both absent and inescapable. And at the center of it all are the people who anchor him: his wife, his young children with their disarming questions, and the West Texas landscape that shaped him.

For readers drawn to the intersection of poetry, theology, and the inner life, Zero at the Bone is both a reckoning and a revelation — for those who have stared into spiritual desolation, for readers who find truth at the edges of language, and for anyone who knows that faith and doubt are not opposites but companions.

Explore more Christian Wiman: Begin with My Bright Abyss for his meditation on faith and illness, or He Held Radical Light for his reflections on poetry and the sacred.

What You’ll Discover

• Fifty compressed, luminous entries on despair, faith, and what endures
• The poetry and prose of Stevens, Dickinson, Clifton, and others in dialogue with Wiman’s own
• Searing memoir woven with theology, criticism, and lyric insight
• A portrait of family, place, and the God who haunts even doubt
• A contemporary mystic’s honest reckoning with darkness and light

Christian Wiman is an award-winning poet, essayist, and editor, and the author of My Bright Abyss and He Held Radical Light. He served as editor of Poetry magazine for a decade and teaches at Yale Divinity School. One of the most searching voices on faith and literature writing today, Wiman brings to his work the precision of a poet and the candor of a man who has lived close to death.

Perfect for: Readers of contemplative and spiritual nonfiction, those navigating doubt, grief, or spiritual desolation, fans of My Bright Abyss and Marilynne Robinson, poetry lovers drawn to theological questions, students of Christian mysticism and contemporary faith writing, those seeking language for the inexpressible, readers of Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, or Denise Levertov, and anyone who has wrestled with God in the dark.

Quality paperback edition | ISBN 9781250338419. Christian Wiman’s career-defining meditation on despair and faith — fifty entries that illuminate the darkness from within.