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.