"These poems invite our presence by their personal reflection on the events of Scripture. Like the evangelists, Vivian writes narrative and confessional theology, urging us to join our presents with those of his speakers and to allow their recollections to give us new perspective. They are poems of memory as much as interpretation, embodying events lived by others from long ago with the help of their, and our, senses. Full of paradox and of erudition, they reveal the poet's search to understand the obscure and to share both the struggle and the tentative understanding he has tentatively reached. Vivian does not feed his hearers with easily accessible piety but offers us blood and bread." --Marsha L. Dutton, Executive Editor, Cistercian Publications "Tim Vivian collects stories from Scripture, mostly from the Gospels, but also from Jewish and Muslim Scriptures, and extends them into the realm of personal and collective imagination. Using the framework of Ignatian contemplation, the poems adopt many voices: the woman taken in adultery, Pilate's wife, and so become universal.

But the themes of the poems, though rooted in Scripture, are very much from our own times and speak to our anxieties, sorrows, and joys." --Lawrence Morey, OCSO, Catholic priest.