On December 12, just over a week after Christian Wiman’s latest book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, was published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, the poet and professor Christian Wiman joined Matthew Boudway on the Upper West Side in Manhattan for the first public reading and conversation. 

Despite the cold, nearly 50 people gathered for the occasion to hear Wiman and Boudway discuss the new book, a collection that Amit Majmudar called “the most quintessentially Wiman of all his books so far,” noting that “Zero at the Bone is astringently, transcendently human.”

The former editor of Poetry magazine and now a professor at Yale Divinity School, Wiman has long been an admirer of Commonweal. As he told the audience, he dutifully reads every issue cover to cover.

UPDATE: Commonweal recorded the December event and produced a podcast-length version of the conversation. Check out the episode, “An Evening with Christian Wiman,”which features Wiman reading and discussing his poetry—as well as his portions of his interview with Commonweal senior editor Matthew Boudway.