Ben Myers
Biographic Data
| ID | 5155819 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Myers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Myers |
| SIGNATURE | BEN MYERS |
| AFFILIATIONS | Alphacrucis University College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7378-692X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 29 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Responding to a Crisis of Hope
This paper explores the potential of patristic theology to offer therapeutic resources for evangelical Christians who experience a crisis of hope: affirming hope doctrinally while struggling to feel hopeful in daily life. Drawing on recent psychological research, we use a tripartite model of hope—cognitive, agentic, and affective—to describe how hopeful experience can be sustained or undermined. We suggest that some theological frameworks, shaped…
Marzi
This article examines ideas about children’s spirituality that are inscribed in the graphic memoir Marzi. Marzi uses word and image, and comic conventions, to represent the religious imagination and the spiritual experiences of the narrator-protagonist during the last years of communism in Poland. Marzi uses visual metaphor and conceptual blending to show the cognitive processes that lead Marzi to differentiate herself from her family’s version o…
Divine and Human Agency in the Poetry of George Herbert
In this article, I explore the technical poetic strategies by which George Herbert represents the relation between divine and human agency. In Herbert’s poetry, God works upon the human will not by external influence but by indwelling human nature and enabling it from within. I show that Herbert follows the contours of an Augustinian theology according to which God is both immanent and transcendent, both “in and beyond” the human being. My readin…
Affliction And Resignation in George Herbert
This paper reflects on the context of lockdown in a global pandemic, where entire populations have experienced severe curtailments of the opportunity to exercise agency. The experience has made me notice the surprisingly large role that resignation has played in Christian moral thinking in earlier ages. This paper takes the devotional poetry of George Herbert as a case study, since Herbert had a particular preoccupation with the psychology of rel…
Does Theology Belong in the University? Schleiermacherian Reflections from an Australian Context
This article argues that theology belongs in the university not because of its relationship to the other disciplines but because of its relationship to the church. It discusses Schleiermacher’s understanding of theology as a practical science oriented towards Christian leadership in society. It argues that Schleiermacher’s account provides an illuminating perspective on the history of academic theology in Australia. Theology belongs in the univer…
Khaled MattawaMare Nostrum
Life,” and “Wishes.” The collection depicts the daily life of the North Korean people— an ode to young political prisoners; a tableau of scorched, traumatized earth; the performances of a child, a worker, a senior; and, finally, a slew of love poems in seemingly impossible circumstances. The first poem, “A New Arirang for the North,” is a rendition of a national folk song, “Arirang,” with lines adhering to its old rhythm while sharply veering int…
Evan JonesLater Emperors
occupation of Gaza caused Aliya’s tragedy. Walls defend those boundaries, disfiguring the Holy Land and filling the angry rhetoric of America’s new president. Disturbed by these controls, Joseph draws a “naked map,” without borders. Boundaries, meanwhile, often signal violence and exile, a status Joseph and his family share. Benjamin left Poland, then Brooklyn; Flint abandoned Brooklyn; Rachel the reservation and her family; Aliya a refugee camp.…
Yuri IzdrykSmokes
Yuri Izdryk Smokes Trans. Roman Ivashkiv & Erin Moure. Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2019. 103 pages. This useful translation of poems, culled from six books by renowned Ukrainian author Yuri Izdryk, makes the most of the facing-page translation format by allowing alphabets to drift across the center line, playfully mixing Cyrillic and Latin scripts in a way that both reduces and reinforces the distance between Ukrainian and English and thu…
Franca MancinelliThe Little Book of Passage
Mariana Dimópulos All My Goodbyes Trans. Alice Whitmore Transit Books Having written and translated multiple novels, Argentine author Mariana Dimópulos’s splintered novella is about murders that haunt a girl in Patagonia. Dimópulos constructs time as fluid, making the narrative structure of the book fragmented; however, while her voice is vivid, at times there is an emotional disconnect between the reader and the characters. Hans Magnus Enzensber…
Hello. Your Promise Has Been Extracted
the left swipe on Tinder. It is, perhaps, the epitome of twenty-first-century love. The final section of three in the book, “Poems Conceived as Dialogues between Two Antagonistic Voices,” is a fascinating marriage of traditional script used as poem and the existential oddities we face in the twenty-first century, such as the noise of virtual reality. Each subsection here lists the full names of characters with brief descriptions to set each scene…
Barefoot by Kevin Hart
song.” In other words, in poem after poem, even the ones seemingly abandoned to the sensual, we find a poet of remarkable depth and originality who finds in the corporeal world that which animates it and gives it meaning. Kinnell is also importantly influenced by Rilke, especially his Duino Elegies, and like Rilke he bears witness to a world that wants to be seen by us and arise again in song. Of all the poets of his generation, Kinnell is likely…
Ultima Ora by Thomas Kabdebo
in which / a rose will be the essence / of all roses.” The advice given here in an imagined dialogue between a contemporary poet and this ancient scribe is perhaps the best summary of Harpur’s achievement in this worthwhile collection of poetry. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University Thomas Kabdebo Ultima Ora County Clare, Ireland. Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions. 2018. 46 pages. Most of the poems in Ultima Ora are brief, sometimes epigrammatic, someti…
The Final Voicemails by Max Ritvo
Manzoor Ahtesham The Tale of the Missing Man Trans. Jason Grunebaum & Ulrike Stark. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2018. 308 pages. In Manzoor Ahtesham’s charming and thoughtful The Tale of the Missing Man, protagonist Zamir Ahmed Khan has a mysterious illness characterized by debilitating ennui. It has become so bad, in fact, that he’s jobless and his wife and children have left him. Zamir’s story weaves in and out of the pas…
If I Were a Suicide Bomber by Thom Satterlee
focused on the physical universe, reaching out to the stars as well as down to the depths of the sea, which may be why she has been called an ecopoet. The outside world is, indeed, perhaps the most important presence in these poems. Yet they are not moralistic and do not indulge themselves in entranced communion with nature (see WLT, Nov. 2014, 30–32). Fiedorczuk writes a metaphysical verse informed by psychology, astronomy, biology , and literar…
Sonnets
collect the fragments of the past, re-created through forceful and poignant imagery. Dawes succeeds in exploring the present condition of the African experience of the diaspora through the lenses of the past and the examination of the self with a great deal of lyricism and creativity. The continuous juggling between the past and the present as well as the use of multifarious voices—of people, spirits, and souls—that speak to the resonances of the…
Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye by YoungShil Ji & Daniel T. Parker
people can’t touch me. Words are my Praetorian Guard. At a sign from me they leap into the line of fire. Whoever comes at me will feel their spears.” Peter Constantine University of Connecticut BoSeon Shim. Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye. Trans. YoungShil Ji & Daniel T. Parker. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2016. 94 pages. American readers owe their gratitude to White Pine Press and to translators YoungShil Ji and Daniel T. Parker …
Don't Try
But these personae flout their limits, fusing body and language to avenge their suffering. They appropriate monstrosity, transforming into cannibals with teeth for hearts, mermaids drowning unsuspecting males. Eve as Anaconda threatens, “Call me murderess.” She is “Venus-trap,” her womb empowered receptacle (“Womb. I boast a vogue sacrosanctum”). Finally, Cannibal’s personae commandeer “the master’s tools” for their indigenous voices, “furred in …
Selected Later Poems by C. K. Williams
Featured Review We’re introducing each issue’s review section with a featured review from one of our long-time reviewers, who is given carte blanche to dig deeper into a book of special merit. We hope you enjoy! Rob Vollmar Book Review Editor C. K. Williams. Selected Later Poems. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 249 pages. When C. K. Williams died last year, he left behind more than half a century’s worth of superb work as well as a sterl…
Straddle by David Cavanagh
David Cavanagh. Straddle. County Clare, Ireland. Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions. 2015. isbn 9781910669082 The little town in which I teach has sustained a Thursday-night open-mic poetry event for the last twenty-one years, and I have been a regular part of it for ten of those years. Most of what I’ve heard there, however good or bad, has had a certain open-mic quality to it, something in the way it is oriented toward its audience. I mean this as…
A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton
Writers Writing Dying by C. K. Williams
Patrick Roth Starlite Terrace Krishna Winston, tr. Seagull Books Four residents of a shabby apartment complex in Los Angeles tell the stories of their complicated existence. Encounters with iconic actors and musicians provide a recognizable historical framework as the narrators reveal details of their often bizarre lives. Patrick Roth, originally from Germany, has worked as a film journalist in LA for over thirty years. march–april 2013 • 153 Vla…
The Virtues of Poetry by James Longenbach
reviews makes it futile to look for common thematic or stylistic patterns. As noted in the foreword, “The range of style, preoccupation, technique is vast, various and impressive.” For most poets, the only common denominator may be traced to their more or less definite Indian roots—a rather tenuous link, considered the subcontinent’s linguistic and cultural diversity, and one which may be mediated or superseded by more recent—and diverse—cultural…
Stealing History
Carlos Zanón The Barcelona Brothers John Cullen, tr. Other Press Beneath the tourist veneer of the sophisticated city of Barcelona lies a dark and tortured subculture. Carlos Zanón presents a classic noir novel of mystery, murder, and anguished love. Zanón is a poet, screenwriter, and literary critic as well as a novelist. The Barcelona Brothers is his first book to appear in English translation. Carmen Tafolla Rebozos Catalina Gárate García, pai…
Sky Ward
Ken Klonsky Life Without Quattro Books The latest offering from Klonsky treats a subject he knows well: wrongful conviction and the corruption of a supposedly just legal system. After the novella’s protagonist is falsely accused of murdering his wife and sentenced to life in prison, his struggle to remain hopeful drives the plot. Klonsky examines a serious subject with a sense of comic absurdity and jaded experience. Young-ha Kim Black Flower Cha…
A Thousand Mornings
72 World Literature Today reviews He compares poetry to prose and asks why one writes poetry when no one has asked for poetry at the library for a year except for himself. His poem “Working Temperature” describes how he falls in love with poetry at the end of each novel he reads. His relationship with poetry is like that of a thief lurking by, trying to steal what he wants. Poetry as a profession doesn’t pay. He continually struggles with this, y…
Does Theology Belong in the University? Schleiermacherian Reflections from an Australian Context
This article argues that theology belongs in the university not because of its relationship to the other disciplines but because of its relationship to the church. It discusses Schleiermacher’s understanding of theology as a practical science oriented towards Christian leadership in society. It argues that Schleiermacher’s account provides an illuminating perspective on the history of academic theology in Australia. Theology belongs in the univer…
Following the Way Which Is Called Heresy
In his prose writings, Milton produces a reinvention of the concept of heresy, and subsequently a theological reinvention of the nature of English society. He envisions a Protestant society united by practices of individual piety and by the "heretical imperative" of autonomous choice. While Milton's account seeks to eliminate the possibilities of religious violence and state persecution, it leads finally to the same impasse as the Lockean theory:…
The Sacred and the Profane in English Renaissance Literature
Karma Crisis
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 71 Pascal Mercier Perlmann’s Silence Shaun Whiteside, tr. Grove Press Trapped in a linguistics conference and unable to cope with his wife’s recent death, Philipp Perlmann turns to plagiarism in a last-ditch effort to complete his keynote address. The consequences of this decision spin quickly out of control. A psychological and philosophical thriller, Perlmann’s Silence relates the tale of a man on the brink. Keith Jardim …
Clavics by Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill. Clavics. London. Enitharmon (Dufour, distr.). 2011. isbn 9781907587115 Only a poet with a sense of time as expansive as Geoffrey Hill’s would attempt an elegy for a man dead almost four hundred years, as Hill does for the composer William Lawes. Yet Clavics is morethanalamentfortheloyalistcomposer slain in battle at Rowton Heath. It isameditationontimeandmemory,on faith and the struggle to believe. Hill’s poetry has always been all…
Writers Writing Dying by C. K. Williams
Patrick Roth Starlite Terrace Krishna Winston, tr. Seagull Books Four residents of a shabby apartment complex in Los Angeles tell the stories of their complicated existence. Encounters with iconic actors and musicians provide a recognizable historical framework as the narrators reveal details of their often bizarre lives. Patrick Roth, originally from Germany, has worked as a film journalist in LA for over thirty years. march–april 2013 • 153 Vla…
The Virtues of Poetry by James Longenbach
reviews makes it futile to look for common thematic or stylistic patterns. As noted in the foreword, “The range of style, preoccupation, technique is vast, various and impressive.” For most poets, the only common denominator may be traced to their more or less definite Indian roots—a rather tenuous link, considered the subcontinent’s linguistic and cultural diversity, and one which may be mediated or superseded by more recent—and diverse—cultural…
Stealing History
Carlos Zanón The Barcelona Brothers John Cullen, tr. Other Press Beneath the tourist veneer of the sophisticated city of Barcelona lies a dark and tortured subculture. Carlos Zanón presents a classic noir novel of mystery, murder, and anguished love. Zanón is a poet, screenwriter, and literary critic as well as a novelist. The Barcelona Brothers is his first book to appear in English translation. Carmen Tafolla Rebozos Catalina Gárate García, pai…
Sky Ward
Ken Klonsky Life Without Quattro Books The latest offering from Klonsky treats a subject he knows well: wrongful conviction and the corruption of a supposedly just legal system. After the novella’s protagonist is falsely accused of murdering his wife and sentenced to life in prison, his struggle to remain hopeful drives the plot. Klonsky examines a serious subject with a sense of comic absurdity and jaded experience. Young-ha Kim Black Flower Cha…
A Thousand Mornings
72 World Literature Today reviews He compares poetry to prose and asks why one writes poetry when no one has asked for poetry at the library for a year except for himself. His poem “Working Temperature” describes how he falls in love with poetry at the end of each novel he reads. His relationship with poetry is like that of a thief lurking by, trying to steal what he wants. Poetry as a profession doesn’t pay. He continually struggles with this, y…
A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton
Straddle by David Cavanagh
David Cavanagh. Straddle. County Clare, Ireland. Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions. 2015. isbn 9781910669082 The little town in which I teach has sustained a Thursday-night open-mic poetry event for the last twenty-one years, and I have been a regular part of it for ten of those years. Most of what I’ve heard there, however good or bad, has had a certain open-mic quality to it, something in the way it is oriented toward its audience. I mean this as…
Selected Later Poems by C. K. Williams
Featured Review We’re introducing each issue’s review section with a featured review from one of our long-time reviewers, who is given carte blanche to dig deeper into a book of special merit. We hope you enjoy! Rob Vollmar Book Review Editor C. K. Williams. Selected Later Poems. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 249 pages. When C. K. Williams died last year, he left behind more than half a century’s worth of superb work as well as a sterl…
If I Were a Suicide Bomber by Thom Satterlee
focused on the physical universe, reaching out to the stars as well as down to the depths of the sea, which may be why she has been called an ecopoet. The outside world is, indeed, perhaps the most important presence in these poems. Yet they are not moralistic and do not indulge themselves in entranced communion with nature (see WLT, Nov. 2014, 30–32). Fiedorczuk writes a metaphysical verse informed by psychology, astronomy, biology , and literar…
Sonnets
collect the fragments of the past, re-created through forceful and poignant imagery. Dawes succeeds in exploring the present condition of the African experience of the diaspora through the lenses of the past and the examination of the self with a great deal of lyricism and creativity. The continuous juggling between the past and the present as well as the use of multifarious voices—of people, spirits, and souls—that speak to the resonances of the…
Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye by YoungShil Ji & Daniel T. Parker
people can’t touch me. Words are my Praetorian Guard. At a sign from me they leap into the line of fire. Whoever comes at me will feel their spears.” Peter Constantine University of Connecticut BoSeon Shim. Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye. Trans. YoungShil Ji & Daniel T. Parker. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2016. 94 pages. American readers owe their gratitude to White Pine Press and to translators YoungShil Ji and Daniel T. Parker …
Don't Try
But these personae flout their limits, fusing body and language to avenge their suffering. They appropriate monstrosity, transforming into cannibals with teeth for hearts, mermaids drowning unsuspecting males. Eve as Anaconda threatens, “Call me murderess.” She is “Venus-trap,” her womb empowered receptacle (“Womb. I boast a vogue sacrosanctum”). Finally, Cannibal’s personae commandeer “the master’s tools” for their indigenous voices, “furred in …
Hello. Your Promise Has Been Extracted
the left swipe on Tinder. It is, perhaps, the epitome of twenty-first-century love. The final section of three in the book, “Poems Conceived as Dialogues between Two Antagonistic Voices,” is a fascinating marriage of traditional script used as poem and the existential oddities we face in the twenty-first century, such as the noise of virtual reality. Each subsection here lists the full names of characters with brief descriptions to set each scene…
Barefoot by Kevin Hart
song.” In other words, in poem after poem, even the ones seemingly abandoned to the sensual, we find a poet of remarkable depth and originality who finds in the corporeal world that which animates it and gives it meaning. Kinnell is also importantly influenced by Rilke, especially his Duino Elegies, and like Rilke he bears witness to a world that wants to be seen by us and arise again in song. Of all the poets of his generation, Kinnell is likely…
Ultima Ora by Thomas Kabdebo
in which / a rose will be the essence / of all roses.” The advice given here in an imagined dialogue between a contemporary poet and this ancient scribe is perhaps the best summary of Harpur’s achievement in this worthwhile collection of poetry. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University Thomas Kabdebo Ultima Ora County Clare, Ireland. Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions. 2018. 46 pages. Most of the poems in Ultima Ora are brief, sometimes epigrammatic, someti…
The Final Voicemails by Max Ritvo
Manzoor Ahtesham The Tale of the Missing Man Trans. Jason Grunebaum & Ulrike Stark. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2018. 308 pages. In Manzoor Ahtesham’s charming and thoughtful The Tale of the Missing Man, protagonist Zamir Ahmed Khan has a mysterious illness characterized by debilitating ennui. It has become so bad, in fact, that he’s jobless and his wife and children have left him. Zamir’s story weaves in and out of the pas…
Yuri IzdrykSmokes
Yuri Izdryk Smokes Trans. Roman Ivashkiv & Erin Moure. Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2019. 103 pages. This useful translation of poems, culled from six books by renowned Ukrainian author Yuri Izdryk, makes the most of the facing-page translation format by allowing alphabets to drift across the center line, playfully mixing Cyrillic and Latin scripts in a way that both reduces and reinforces the distance between Ukrainian and English and thu…
Franca MancinelliThe Little Book of Passage
Mariana Dimópulos All My Goodbyes Trans. Alice Whitmore Transit Books Having written and translated multiple novels, Argentine author Mariana Dimópulos’s splintered novella is about murders that haunt a girl in Patagonia. Dimópulos constructs time as fluid, making the narrative structure of the book fragmented; however, while her voice is vivid, at times there is an emotional disconnect between the reader and the characters. Hans Magnus Enzensber…
Khaled MattawaMare Nostrum
Life,” and “Wishes.” The collection depicts the daily life of the North Korean people— an ode to young political prisoners; a tableau of scorched, traumatized earth; the performances of a child, a worker, a senior; and, finally, a slew of love poems in seemingly impossible circumstances. The first poem, “A New Arirang for the North,” is a rendition of a national folk song, “Arirang,” with lines adhering to its old rhythm while sharply veering int…
Evan JonesLater Emperors
occupation of Gaza caused Aliya’s tragedy. Walls defend those boundaries, disfiguring the Holy Land and filling the angry rhetoric of America’s new president. Disturbed by these controls, Joseph draws a “naked map,” without borders. Boundaries, meanwhile, often signal violence and exile, a status Joseph and his family share. Benjamin left Poland, then Brooklyn; Flint abandoned Brooklyn; Rachel the reservation and her family; Aliya a refugee camp.…
Does Theology Belong in the University? Schleiermacherian Reflections from an Australian Context
This article argues that theology belongs in the university not because of its relationship to the other disciplines but because of its relationship to the church. It discusses Schleiermacher’s understanding of theology as a practical science oriented towards Christian leadership in society. It argues that Schleiermacher’s account provides an illuminating perspective on the history of academic theology in Australia. Theology belongs in the univer…
Art (24 works) · Literature (23 works) · History (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Poetry (18 works) · Art history (17 works) · Theology (11 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (6 works) · Aesthetics (4 works)