Well, for starters, he wouldn’t. Wiman is far from settled on what he thinks about God, faith, or poetry. Along with confessing doubt in general (which he admits can become a comforting idol), Wiman calls attention to his particular uncertainties. He makes his fallibility transparent by highlighting his struggle to articulate what he thinks. Rather than correcting himself by deleting all of his mistakes before publication, he leaves in blunders and corrects himself later with a “no” or an acknowledgement that his turn of phrase is inadequate or that he has used “precisely the wrong verb.” This move not only resists the temptation to write quotable axioms but also gives the words a human voice, a classic poetic move. The poet Scott Cairns says that the best poems show a mind at work; apparently the best theological essays do the same. Additionally, Wiman owns his inconsistencies. After reading one entry, I wondered if the essay’s thesis directly contradicted a previous chapter. I might have been wrong, but I felt some relief when I soon read an entry written as an argument with himself. The conversation is witty, biting, and all-too relatable. What a comfort to hear another great poet grumble, “Very well then, I contradict myself.”

Along with calling attention to his limitations as a writer, Wiman also shares his everyday life and present-day sins more than he has in previous books. Perhaps it’s because Zero at the Bone doesn’t focus on his cancer diagnosis and his conversion to Christianity but the years after what he believed would be end of his story. “Conversion, like creation, is ongoing,” he writes. This book is the “ongoing.” He still circles the topics of his earlier work, but now he locates much of his philosophy, poetry, and despair in the mundanity of a Christian poet’s daily existence. We can romanticize a terminal illness (here’s looking at you, Dickens), but not so much the common experiences of tense family dinners, trips to the gym, and the dumpster fire of American politics. Like his choice to correct his own language, this shift humanizes Wiman in a new way and, in my opinion, gives the book greater emotional heft. While I loved nearly every entry, I found Wiman’s personal essays the most stirring. In a piercing family story, “White Buffalo,” Wiman includes both the first version of the essay and a coda written a decade later in which he chides himself for leaning into “a willed death of hope.” In his penultimate entry, “The Cancer Chair,” Wiman writes a reflection on suffering and Job, but the theology is contextualized in (and interrupted by) a day of cancer treatment full of its frustrations and embarrassments. The cancer chair literally grounds the suffering that we often try to abstract in sermons and poems, and while Wiman might not be able to articulate the pain of cancer, he can relate his less-than-saintly attitude toward treatment.