Stuart Dybek

Nov 27, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Christian Göbel |Paul Moses |Stuart Dybek |Michael Peppard

“All generations shall call me blessed,” she correctly predicted in her famous song of prayer, the Magnificat (Luke 1:48). From late antiquity to the present, images of Mary during her miraculous pregnancy, cradling the infant Jesus, suffering at his death, praying at his Ascension, and being crowned heavenly queen have populated Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Whether wandering the countryside of Poland or Costa Rica, you will find her there.

Nov 27, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Stuart Dybek |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch

The tracks of whatever he’s been following endat an abandoned mill where a river exhalesfrom a beaver dam, without pausing to breathe in. He needs to retrace the waffled prints he’s stampedon fields and pastures whose barbed fencesare drifted over, and that wind is swirling away. He didn’t set out snowshoeing across an erasedlandscape to wait beside a river while it prayed.

May 3, 2023 | commonwealmagazine.org | Stuart Dybek |James T. Kloppenberg |John Slattery |Karen Kilby

This should be tapped in staccato like a telegram,on an obsolete Underwood condemned to a gratedpawnshop window, for disseminating what was banned,striking a ribbon spooled from dark nylons thunder worewhen it shocked lilacs into bloom. Afterward, the lawnwas pasted with confetti as if a parade had passed.  Before a blue Madonna, a baptismal birdbath crestedin a lilac foam.