The Strangeness of the Good

“James Matthew Wilson makes the everyday lyrically urgent and memorable. Few poets writing today do so with such unfailing elegance, close attention to the human world, and generosity of spirit.”

—KEVIN HART

Edwin B Kyle Professor of Christian Studies, The University of Virginia 

“The Strangeness of the Good is a beautiful act of faith. As we seek to see and reflect God’s beauty in the world, these poems will help us be enchanted with the Divine life—in these times when the world needs us to be that hope in the world!”

—KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ

Senior Fellow, National Review Institute; editor-at-large, National Review

“The Strangeness of the Good shows us yet again what contemporary American poetry written in an American idiom with a fluency few can equal looks and sounds like. For years, I searched for a wisdom and humanity in father figures like Robert Lowell and John Berryman and found only in shards there what I have found (to my surprise and delight) in someone decades younger than myself. Especially in his Quarantine Notebook, James Matthew Wilson has wrought comfort and light out of darkness and managed to ‘build new worlds at the center of the old.’”

—PAUL MARIANI

author of Ordinary Time and Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life

“Quarantine Notebook, composed of fifteen monologues written during the COVID lockdown, gives us a new and powerful Wilson. It’s the brilliant genesis of a writer re-born.”

—SAMUEL J. HAZO

Pennsylvania Poet Laureate, 1993–2003