One Day This Book: A Review of Miah Jeffra’s The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!
We know that body shame. Seeing it, hearing it, we start to question the shaming instead of the bodily experience.
Review of Appalachia’s Alternative to Mainstream America by Paul Salstrom
As a kid lying on the floor beneath the big passive-solar windows of the house my mom designed on a piece of graph paper, paging through the large-format Whole Earth Catalog, I sensed the empowering impulse to take tools into one’s own hands and live closer to the source of things.
Thinking Out Loud With Others: A Review of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom
without suppression, shaming, or ejection as go-to options, we learn to fellowship differently
How to Order the Universe: a Review
The only thing to keep human beings from being lost in time is the stories they tell, but even these have a habit of disappearing.
A Framework of Angels: Angelicus
Amid days of sometimes groping for the way forward, examples of angelic humility offer a kindly scaffold.
Review: Dialogues with Rising Tides
All to say that the joys and pains, traumas and experiences, pasts, phobias, and hopes we carry influence every particle of matter we contact, initiating change and exchange
"Alone with the Work": A conversation with Amy E. Weldon
I really don't believe that we are going to internet our way out of this.
Bone Seeker: A Review
Some might call anxiety, too, a certain kind of obsession over endings—when they will inevitably land, who they will take first, how the hell we can prevent them
On The Spectrum: A Review
Through Bowman’s rich and varied essays, he invites us to redefine autism, not as a death sentence or a stamp of medical ire, but rather as a deepening of one’s true sense of a self.
A review of Anjali Enjeti’s essay collection Southbound
And yet, both artistry and activism are born from the seeds of passion.
The Oracle Pool: An Interview
Is it possible in this world to have anything miraculous happen? Are there sacred places that still exist?
SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY: A Review
A truly intersectional world has not yet been realized, but Putney imagines it, hopes for it, asks, What might it mean to unmake our binary-loving gods?
Ancient Songs of Us—or How to Face Our Monsters
Cities and names are all washed away, but we’re here, still witnessing and partaking in life, adding more footprints to the eternal shores.
An Apprenticeship with Sorrow
When COVID-19 joined the long list of climacterics we’d been enduring—hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, floods, and unprecedented housing and employment shortages—I felt an urgency to understand the overwhelming grief, loss, and uncertainty I was experiencing.
A Review of A.G. Mojtabai’s Thirst: A Novel
I love saying these sentences out loud, hearing the hard ‘t’ sounds resonate, the quiet of all those h’s.
Smallness by Smallness: An Interview with Lauren Camp
Poetry demands a visionary way to see. It lets the writer chisel into the most valuable part of the stone. None of this is easy, but that complicated thought and consideration appeals to me.
A Lush Poetic Garden: A Review of Sweet Herbaceous Miracle by Berwyn Moore
In her third full-length collection of poetry, Erie County’s inaugural poet laureate tends a lush poetic garden.
“A Holy Multiplicity”: a review of Keren Dibbens-Wyatt’s Recital of Love
Some of the pieces feel exhortative, some poetic, some like love letters, some like the teasing of a good friend who knows you a bit too well.
Mourning Together: An Interview with Colombian Artist Erika Diettes
In a better society, dying in atrocious ways would not be a possibility. Today, we are all wishing to not die alone.
“Holding a Stuffed Raccoon Up to the Sky”: a review of Erin Carlyle’s Magnolia Canopy Otherworld
We must become the girl, but we must also become The Animal, the man, the trash stuck to skirts.
Interview with Kathryn Clark, artist of the Foreclosure Series featured in Under Pressure: Issue 55
People are more willing to look at art objectively than listen [objectively] to what a politician has to say.
Analytical Tenderness: A Review of Uma Menon’s Poetry Collection Hands for Language
Menon’s approach in this collection gives us a simple, elegant way to listen to others better.
Gathered Together in the Dark, Part 5: A conversation with poet Shann Ray, continued
I try to imagine science, art, and the numinous as interrelated, like good sisters.
Gathered Together in the Dark, Part 4: A conversation with poet Shann Ray
Everyone can know and be known. Mercy tells us so.
Gathered Together in the Dark, Part 3: A conversation with artist Trinh Mai, continued
I have witnessed a healing that arises from death in the form of forgiveness.
Gathered Together in the Dark, Part 2: A conversation with artist Trinh Mai
The ability to bring thoughtform into lifeform is a characteristic of being made in God’s own image.
Gathered Together in the Dark, Part 1: A Review of Atomic Theory 7: Poems to my Wife and God
By locating questions of faith and doubt within the atomic, these poems enact a theology where the divine resides within instead of above the physical world.
Wonder, Despite: A Review of AFTER JUNE
Like many writers, she wondered if she shouldn’t give up. Why were we squandering time and money on art that few, if any, would read? The answer, as always, is because we have to.
Review of Melissa Reeser Poulin’s Rupture, Light
Melissa Reeser Poulin’s latest chapbook, Rupture, Light (Finishing Line Press), is a journey down the fathoms-deep well of human experience. The poet’s word choice and lines are clear and clean like cold water––and just as refreshing. Poulin plunges the reader into wanting, anticipation, anxiety, and joy.
Song of a Captive Bird: A Review
Forugh says: “Writing had cost me so much, but it was also the thing that saved me, that allowed me to live. I wasn’t the woman I wanted to be yet, but I was beginning to resemble her now.”
To Remake the World: A Review of Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else
In Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else...Mock explores gender equality, singleness, body image, and other cultural expectations that manifest inequity, courageously advocating for a world that embraces all people...Worthy...call[s] upon Christians to “remake the church from within..."
The Afterlives of American Evangelicalism: A Review of Interior States By Meghan O’Gieblyn
"To be a former believer," she writes in her evocative first essay collection, Interior States, “is to perpetually return to the scene of the crime." Each of her fifteen essays, wide-ranging in their content, contains an element of that circling back around: to her Midwestern evangelical childhood or to her time at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where the threading began to unravel.
Review of The Divine Magnet
Niemeyer foregrounds the ways the letters reflect the writer’s intense moral and spiritual concerns. “That these letters … read much like homilies is a key to their power and genius,” he claims, departing without apology from those who find them more manic than ministerial.
Review of Getting to Gardisky Lake
As I carried Paul J. Willis 2016 collection, Getting to Gardisky Lake with me for the last several weeks, I found innumerable mantrams among the poems, grounding myself amidst Willis’ stories of the wilderness, the classroom, of aging and of loving. It seems there is nothing his poetry does not touch...
Review of Light When It Comes By Chris Anderson
That very quality of tenderness—and honesty, and sincerity, and authenticity—is what marks Light When It Comes. The book is arranged in ten short chapters which themselves are broken into what can only be described as pericopes—the kind of fragments of narrative and utterance that make up the scriptures themselves.
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.