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Home: 100 Poems
Evocative poems and prose fragments about home, selected by one of the most celebrated poets of our time
“This is a book of longing, yes, and also spiritual discernment, political awareness, historical memory, and deep intimacy.”—Carolyn Forché
In this poignant collection, Christian Wiman draws together one hundred evocative poems and prose fragments about home, exploring home’s deep theological, literary, philosophical, historical, political, and social dimensions. Wiman calls home “a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god.” It’s “a word that disperses into more definitions than one book can contain.”
The tensions between diffusion and concentration, roaming and rootedness, precarity and security are everywhere in this book, often in the same poem. Ranging from early modernism to the current moment, and from southern Africa to the Arctic Circle, the selections are as diverse as the poets included. Collectively they envision an imaginative home for even the most homeless of modern readers. Completed entirely during quarantine, amid the miseries of separation and isolation, the collection offers a powerful vision of home as both a place and a way.
“This is a book of longing, yes, and also spiritual discernment, political awareness, historical memory, and deep intimacy.”—Carolyn Forché
In this poignant collection, Christian Wiman draws together one hundred evocative poems and prose fragments about home, exploring home’s deep theological, literary, philosophical, historical, political, and social dimensions. Wiman calls home “a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god.” It’s “a word that disperses into more definitions than one book can contain.”
The tensions between diffusion and concentration, roaming and rootedness, precarity and security are everywhere in this book, often in the same poem. Ranging from early modernism to the current moment, and from southern Africa to the Arctic Circle, the selections are as diverse as the poets included. Collectively they envision an imaginative home for even the most homeless of modern readers. Completed entirely during quarantine, amid the miseries of separation and isolation, the collection offers a powerful vision of home as both a place and a way.
- GenresPoetry
264 pages, Hardcover
Published November 3, 2021
14 people are currently reading
171 people want to read
About the author
Christian Wiman
144 books323 followersChristian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in West Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003 he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
April 28, 2022
“for the word tree I have been shown a tree
And for the word rock I have been shown a rock
For stream, for cloud, for star
This place has provided firm implication and answering
But where here is the image for longing”
From “For Harold Bloom”
This collection of poetry has many poems in it that have become touchstones for me for certain feelings.
It is difficult for me (and probably others) to pinpoint a feeling and say, “See this is it, this is the feeling I am feeling, do you also see it?” Poetry has the uncanny ability to provide edges around these ineffable things, albeit, soft and squishy edges.
If you’ve ever had a homesickness, or thought of your childhood home, or traveled, or longed for a home, or have been displaced emotionally or physically, this collection of poems will have one if not several for you.
Some favorites:
“Harbour”
“On R.L.S and Happiness”
“If China”
“Shema”
And for the word rock I have been shown a rock
For stream, for cloud, for star
This place has provided firm implication and answering
But where here is the image for longing”
From “For Harold Bloom”
This collection of poetry has many poems in it that have become touchstones for me for certain feelings.
It is difficult for me (and probably others) to pinpoint a feeling and say, “See this is it, this is the feeling I am feeling, do you also see it?” Poetry has the uncanny ability to provide edges around these ineffable things, albeit, soft and squishy edges.
If you’ve ever had a homesickness, or thought of your childhood home, or traveled, or longed for a home, or have been displaced emotionally or physically, this collection of poems will have one if not several for you.
Some favorites:
“Harbour”
“On R.L.S and Happiness”
“If China”
“Shema”
August 21, 2022
A thoughtful and surprisingly sharp collection of poems that romanticize, contemplate, and, at times, condemn our ideas of home. I love Wiman's poetry and the collections he edits, but I don't think that predisposition overshadows how sharp his selections and framing are with this book. His (dense but lovely) introduction makes it obvious that this book was created amidst COVID, and you can feel that context pressing against the pages. It can function outside that context but is sharpest when viewed within it because it forces you to consider (or reconsider) the different repercussions of being asked/forced to isolate in your home. I don't think there's a particular takeaway Wiman wants his readers to have, though. The book is meant to be a meditation on home as a physical space, an emotion, a people, the lack of space, and more.
The poets featured here range from across the globe and aren't confined to any one time period, either, so we get to explore different concepts of "home" from a diverse assortment of perspectives. Wiman groups them smartly, too, and lets specific (unmarked) sections occupy a shared tone. One batch of poems might focus on idealized views, another might come off as more sad or regretful, but it's the borderline angry, interrogative sections that hit me hardest. The issues are timeless and plucked from the present and the past, but in the framing provided by this book, they hit on distinctly modern themes and questions. Wiman's political slant can be glimpsed, but that's by design, and I'd rather see the strings of an editor in a collection like this than not.
I will likely be simmering on this for the rest of the year. It struck a nerve I didn't know I had, which is almost always the reaction I want a work of poetry to do. I loved it.
The poets featured here range from across the globe and aren't confined to any one time period, either, so we get to explore different concepts of "home" from a diverse assortment of perspectives. Wiman groups them smartly, too, and lets specific (unmarked) sections occupy a shared tone. One batch of poems might focus on idealized views, another might come off as more sad or regretful, but it's the borderline angry, interrogative sections that hit me hardest. The issues are timeless and plucked from the present and the past, but in the framing provided by this book, they hit on distinctly modern themes and questions. Wiman's political slant can be glimpsed, but that's by design, and I'd rather see the strings of an editor in a collection like this than not.
I will likely be simmering on this for the rest of the year. It struck a nerve I didn't know I had, which is almost always the reaction I want a work of poetry to do. I loved it.
September 12, 2022
Back in the summer of 2020—a time when no one was feeling particularly joyful—I made my way through Joy: 100 Poems, a collection edited by Christian Wiman. It was a discordant experience at the time, and a necessary one. Sometimes, poetry is sustenance.
Turns out that during that same summer, Wiman was putting together Home: 100 Poems (Yale University Press). “If it’s true that only those who lose a home know what one is, in recent months many of us have learned a burning corollary: nothing tests one’s attachment to home like being confined in it,” Wiman writes in the introduction.
Ask 100 people what home means to them and you’ll get 100 different answers: “a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god.” When a word can mean anything, that’s a problem. But it also signals there’s something worth exploring. “A word whose meanings are so various and contradictory means something is deeply—and still—at stake.”
Turns out that during that same summer, Wiman was putting together Home: 100 Poems (Yale University Press). “If it’s true that only those who lose a home know what one is, in recent months many of us have learned a burning corollary: nothing tests one’s attachment to home like being confined in it,” Wiman writes in the introduction.
Ask 100 people what home means to them and you’ll get 100 different answers: “a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god.” When a word can mean anything, that’s a problem. But it also signals there’s something worth exploring. “A word whose meanings are so various and contradictory means something is deeply—and still—at stake.”
Read
April 21, 2024DNF. I liked his previous anthology, but this one didn’t grab me.
September 8, 2023
A book to chew on.
October 23, 2023
This anthology of poems is one of the best I've read. So many deeply moving and existential poems related to the concept of home such as time, memory, and impermanence; belonging/exclusion, hospitality/inhospitality; displacement; home and relationships with children, friends, and the dead; our identities and how they change; etc. I enjoyed so many of the poems, but a few of my favorite are "The Niagara River" (Kay Ryan), "Snake" (D.H. Lawrence), "Shema" (Primo Levi), "The Children are Back" (Marilyn Taylor), "What Good Poems are For" (Tom Wayman"), "This" (Anne Stevenson), and "Toward the Solstice" (Adrienne Rich).
February 21, 2023
Personal Memo: Caroline sent me a copy of Home: 100 Poems for my 29th birthday, which I received and read while I was home with my parents in Indiana. The year before, she gifted me The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. She has a knack for sending me hard-hitting poetry and prose on the themes that bedevil me most. She knows me too well.
Home: 100 Poems, edited by Christian Wiman, is a current of poems and prose interludes that drifts across ideas of home as "a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god." This collection carries you slowly, tenderly across core ideas of home, and they move beautifully together. "Home both as a place and a way," for this reader, often feels elusive, out of reach, and very far away. As regards the reader, Wiman is considerate and kind; he knows the knottiness of evoking imaginations of home. It is all the more touching to know Wiman put together and published this collection during the COVID-19 pandemic—a period where home was a cell, a dream, a memory, and so much more.
From the collection, here are 10 of my favorite pieces. But god dang, it is hard to select favorites when the collection includes GOATs like Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anne Carson, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and others.
1. "Innocence" by Patrick Kavanagh: This Monaghan man and his divided yet undying love of place brought me to tears. Gorgeous.
2. Excerpt from "Beyond Belief" by John Koethe: "The hard part / Is to find yourself at home with where and what you are / And still remain amazed." These few lines are extraordinary. Simple in concept but severe in practice.
3. "Toward the Solstice" by Adrienne Rich: "I have failed or forgotten to say / year after year, winter / after summer, the right rune / to ease the hold of the past / upon the rest of my life / and ease my hold on the past."
4. This Room and Everything in It" "by Li-Young Lee: A soft and insightful poem about memory and use of metaphor to cope with death and love.
5. Excerpt from The Long-Legged Horse by Wendell Berry: "And so here, in the place I love more than any other and where I have chosen among all other places to live my life, I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place."
6. "Lot's Wife" by Anna Akhmatova (translated from the Russian by Richard Wilbur): A breathtaking rendering and understanding of the "wild grief" that held Lot's wife fleeing Sodom.
7. Excerpt from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson: "To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving give it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries..."
8. "Snake" by D.H. Lawrence: Delicious and inventive descriptions (that puts me in the mind of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red). "And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down..." "Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels / of the earth."
9. Excerpt from Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy: "It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you—they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less—but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon."
10. "Winding Up" by Derek Walcott: A heartrendering acceptance of loneliness; "we are what we have made."
Home: 100 Poems, edited by Christian Wiman, is a current of poems and prose interludes that drifts across ideas of home as "a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god." This collection carries you slowly, tenderly across core ideas of home, and they move beautifully together. "Home both as a place and a way," for this reader, often feels elusive, out of reach, and very far away. As regards the reader, Wiman is considerate and kind; he knows the knottiness of evoking imaginations of home. It is all the more touching to know Wiman put together and published this collection during the COVID-19 pandemic—a period where home was a cell, a dream, a memory, and so much more.
From the collection, here are 10 of my favorite pieces. But god dang, it is hard to select favorites when the collection includes GOATs like Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anne Carson, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and others.
1. "Innocence" by Patrick Kavanagh: This Monaghan man and his divided yet undying love of place brought me to tears. Gorgeous.
2. Excerpt from "Beyond Belief" by John Koethe: "The hard part / Is to find yourself at home with where and what you are / And still remain amazed." These few lines are extraordinary. Simple in concept but severe in practice.
3. "Toward the Solstice" by Adrienne Rich: "I have failed or forgotten to say / year after year, winter / after summer, the right rune / to ease the hold of the past / upon the rest of my life / and ease my hold on the past."
4. This Room and Everything in It" "by Li-Young Lee: A soft and insightful poem about memory and use of metaphor to cope with death and love.
5. Excerpt from The Long-Legged Horse by Wendell Berry: "And so here, in the place I love more than any other and where I have chosen among all other places to live my life, I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place."
6. "Lot's Wife" by Anna Akhmatova (translated from the Russian by Richard Wilbur): A breathtaking rendering and understanding of the "wild grief" that held Lot's wife fleeing Sodom.
7. Excerpt from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson: "To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving give it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries..."
8. "Snake" by D.H. Lawrence: Delicious and inventive descriptions (that puts me in the mind of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red). "And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down..." "Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels / of the earth."
9. Excerpt from Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy: "It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you—they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less—but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon."
10. "Winding Up" by Derek Walcott: A heartrendering acceptance of loneliness; "we are what we have made."
January 29, 2022
This is a carefully curated selection of poems and some prose excerpts dealing with the many aspects of home -- where it is, physically, emotionally and spiritually -- and what home means to groups like refugees, people of color, those reflecting on their childhood homes, and those who think about the Earth as our universal home.
As with any poetry collection, there were some poems that did not click with me. But in general, Wiman did a wonderful job in his choices and his rationale for them.
It is hard to pick a single favorite, but for an example of one of the most powerful and provocative poems, I offer this one, Exodus 10, by Eve Ewing.
Exodus 10
Eve Ewing
There is nothing in the make-up of a Negro, physically or mentally, which should induce anyone to welcome him as a neighbor. The best of them are insanitary, insurance companies class them as poor risks, ruin alone follows in their path. (from a 1920 issue of the Property Owners’ Journal, 151)
And the Lord said unto the people,
“Stretch out thy hands toward heaven,
that there may be darkness over the city,
even darkness which may be felt.”
And the people stretched forth their hands,
and there was a thick darkness in all the city:
it weighed heavy on the heads of saint
and sinner alike. And the people smiled upon the darkness,
and the darkness was good. For upon them the darkness
was as burnt sugar: pleasing to the skin, and sweet upon the lips.
And the people delighted in the darkness.
But upon the wicked, the darkness was as a plague,
and beneath it they writhed in torment, weeping and calling for mercy.
The thickness of the darkness was such that they saw not one another,
neither rose any from their place for days. And the people found leisure,
calling to one another through the darkness as in a child’s game,
and they found each other in laughter. And to them, all noise was joyful
in the darkness, so that each found the work of the Lord
in the song of the sparrow or the sigh of a sleeping infant. And it was good.
But the wicked people were slothful, and found only misery in their repose.
And the kings, their hearts hardened, called unto the people, and said,
“Go! Get thee from us! Take heed to thyselves, and leave the city.”
But the people stood in the darkness, and each reached with a staff
toward heaven, and they spoke as one, saying then “Nay,
for the Lord our God is with us, and the city is granted unto us,
and it shall be a city of darkness for all days to come.”
This collection will have you thinking deeply about what home means to you, whether it is your roots, your nest or your destination.
As with any poetry collection, there were some poems that did not click with me. But in general, Wiman did a wonderful job in his choices and his rationale for them.
It is hard to pick a single favorite, but for an example of one of the most powerful and provocative poems, I offer this one, Exodus 10, by Eve Ewing.
Exodus 10
Eve Ewing
There is nothing in the make-up of a Negro, physically or mentally, which should induce anyone to welcome him as a neighbor. The best of them are insanitary, insurance companies class them as poor risks, ruin alone follows in their path. (from a 1920 issue of the Property Owners’ Journal, 151)
And the Lord said unto the people,
“Stretch out thy hands toward heaven,
that there may be darkness over the city,
even darkness which may be felt.”
And the people stretched forth their hands,
and there was a thick darkness in all the city:
it weighed heavy on the heads of saint
and sinner alike. And the people smiled upon the darkness,
and the darkness was good. For upon them the darkness
was as burnt sugar: pleasing to the skin, and sweet upon the lips.
And the people delighted in the darkness.
But upon the wicked, the darkness was as a plague,
and beneath it they writhed in torment, weeping and calling for mercy.
The thickness of the darkness was such that they saw not one another,
neither rose any from their place for days. And the people found leisure,
calling to one another through the darkness as in a child’s game,
and they found each other in laughter. And to them, all noise was joyful
in the darkness, so that each found the work of the Lord
in the song of the sparrow or the sigh of a sleeping infant. And it was good.
But the wicked people were slothful, and found only misery in their repose.
And the kings, their hearts hardened, called unto the people, and said,
“Go! Get thee from us! Take heed to thyselves, and leave the city.”
But the people stood in the darkness, and each reached with a staff
toward heaven, and they spoke as one, saying then “Nay,
for the Lord our God is with us, and the city is granted unto us,
and it shall be a city of darkness for all days to come.”
This collection will have you thinking deeply about what home means to you, whether it is your roots, your nest or your destination.
May 19, 2023
An amazing anthology of poems for those who feel the need to interrogate the idea of "home." This is a book is a study of "home" through the modern poets.
I feel like I learned how to read poetry as I read this book. What worked for me was to read two poems a day: one that I hadn't read yet, and one that I read the first time on the previous day. If a poem needed more than two days, I would keep reading it the following day and the following day until I was ready to set it aside. This was an interesting experience. Often I would read a poem for the first time and it would resemble little more than obscure words in a strange order on the page. As I continued reading it day after day, however, the poem would slowly bud and then even begin to bloom. It is as if understanding wasn't a function of effort as much as it was a function of time. Reading these poems was like cultivating a garden that soon started cultivating me. The bounty was well worth the labor.
Christian Wiman's essay(s) that introduces this anthology is beautiful and insightful. After reading through the poetry over many months, I returned to these essays to re-read them. I was abundantly rewarded. After undergoing this study on poetry, I had a deeper and richer understanding of the essay(s). And the essay(s) gave me a deeper and richer relationship with the poetry.
I can't say anything about this collection any better than Wiman says himself. This is how he compares "Home" to his prior collection entitled "Joy":
I feel like I learned how to read poetry as I read this book. What worked for me was to read two poems a day: one that I hadn't read yet, and one that I read the first time on the previous day. If a poem needed more than two days, I would keep reading it the following day and the following day until I was ready to set it aside. This was an interesting experience. Often I would read a poem for the first time and it would resemble little more than obscure words in a strange order on the page. As I continued reading it day after day, however, the poem would slowly bud and then even begin to bloom. It is as if understanding wasn't a function of effort as much as it was a function of time. Reading these poems was like cultivating a garden that soon started cultivating me. The bounty was well worth the labor.
Christian Wiman's essay(s) that introduces this anthology is beautiful and insightful. After reading through the poetry over many months, I returned to these essays to re-read them. I was abundantly rewarded. After undergoing this study on poetry, I had a deeper and richer understanding of the essay(s). And the essay(s) gave me a deeper and richer relationship with the poetry.
I can't say anything about this collection any better than Wiman says himself. This is how he compares "Home" to his prior collection entitled "Joy":
In Joy, a long and wide-ranging search led me to an increasingly focused sense of what that word might mean. With Home, a similar search has caused the governing word to disperse into more definitions than one book can contain. This frustrated me for a while. A word that means everything--home is a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god--means nothing. Gradually, though, I have found the linguistic slippage provocative. A word whose meanings are so various and contradictory means something is deeply--and still--at stake. A certain circularity is to be expected--and not embraced, either, but endured.
December 24, 2021
Wish I could give this one a 3.5💫 I love Christian Wiman and the collection of poems around one theme. This was compiled during quarantine and Wiman said “if it’s true that only those who lose a home know what one is, in recent months many of us have learned a burning corollary: nothing tests ones attachment to home like being confined to it.” This lil number had so many perspectives of what home can mean. “A word that means everything- Home is a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god-means nothing.” It highlighted home for the family, the exile and the wanderer. From Baldwin to Berry to Harjo to Morrison this collection had lots to say 😽
January 8, 2022
A thoughtful anthology of poems exploring the concept of home. I love how Wiman curates his anthologies with short excerpts of prose from authors between the poems; it creates a compelling sort of associative movement that carries you through the collection. Carolyn Forché’s blurb describes it well: “a book of longing, yes, and also spiritual discernment, political awareness, historical memory, and deep intimacy.”
April 29, 2024
Christian Wiman is always ahead of me. Sometimes so far ahead of me that reading him is like a tracker gathering clues in a thinly wooded forest. But when one discovers something in his writing or curation thereof, the payoff is rich.
January 25, 2022
What an incredible, beautiful collection. I love the diversity of authors and forms, and how organically it is organized.
January 30, 2022
wish there were more of his writing between the poems but lovely as is, esp a plethora of poems-in-translation.
February 24, 2022
I keep wanting to be a poetry person, but mostly I'm not. Grateful for Wiman's selections of poetry, though, surrounding a topic that fascinates me - what does home mean to human beings, exactly?
January 6, 2024
I read this anthology over and over for much of the year along with it's companion (?) anthology "JOY" and enjoyed doing so. Thanks SFPL!!
Read
July 30, 2024finished my (possibly first ever) poetry book!
December 28, 2025
read this for class but surprsingly enjoyed it
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews