On a purely linguistic level, the greatest working poet. Not even a competition. Wiman has moved from the existential ennui of Every Riven Thing to something both more assured and cynical. Brilliant.

This book is beautiful and offers solace in one hand and sharp introspective critique in the other. Wiman uses language and faith as ever-present tools to help us traverse love, whimsy, grief, and monotony. Will come back to this again and again.

Christian Wiman has been a favorite poet of mine for a while now, and it was with enthusiasm that I began reading this newest collection. I have occasionally wondered when I will next encounter a book of poetry from a beloved poet that will fail to meet my expectations and disappoint me with its failure to provide the satisfactory experience of previous collections. No such concerns were warranted in this instance. Survival Is a Style may possibly be my favorite of Wiman's works thus far. On several pages I found myself re-reading certain poems because they were so good I was unwilling to move on to the next. A couple of times I felt the need to stop and share a poem with friends, because it seemed urgent that such beauty be circulated immediately. If it is indeed true that the more one knows, the more one realizes how little one actually knows, it is fascinating to watch Wiman ask increasingly thoughtful questions concerning his faith, his health, and his aging. He and I share a few commonalities: age, home, and religion, and it is particularly moving to be presented with surprisingly similar treatments of many of my own thoughts, questions, and emotions reflected in these amazing poems. I cannot recommend this one highly enough.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the electronic advance reader copy.