“In my experience, the worst despair is meaninglessness,” says Christian Wiman. “It’s not necessarily thinking that you’re going to die. It’s the feeling that life has been leeched of meaning.”

In his new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, the acclaimed poet chases meaning through words, including memoir and poetry. Wiman returned to Christian faith in part through a terminal cancer diagnosis–one that he has, to his astonishment, now lived with for over 18 years. He explores themes of illness, love, faith, and the “almost spiritual joy” of encountering a deadly coral snake. “His poetry and scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world,” writes Marilynne Robinson, enabling him to “say new things in timeless language.”

We hosted an Online Conversation with Christian Wiman on April 26 to explore questions of faith, language, suffering, and meaning.

Thank you to our co-host, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for their support of this event!