The Englewood Review of Books
Best Books of 2020
Advent / Christmas Calendar
December 31
The Englewood Review of Books
Island of the Innocent:
A Consideration of the Book of Job
Diane Glancy
Paperback: Turtle Point Press, 2020
Buy Now: [ IndieBound ] [ Amazon ]
Glancy tells us that as she meditated on Job [ in Island of the Innocent ], “Other times and places bled into the story. Among the first to disrupt the text were Indians and the history of America. Feathers appeared over the edge of a hill. The feathers were in headdresses. The headdresses were on heads.” So this book has a visionary quality—in some respects, Glancy writes as a seer, but one who is very down-to-earth. One of the poems or unclassifiable “texts” that make up this book (for, as I’ve said elsewhere, Glancy is a shape-shifter, writing fiction and plays and essays but also often genre-crossing books such as this one) is titled “Clarification for the Knitting and Fabric-Arts Club of Uz.”
Glancy herself is Native American, the daughter of a Cherokee father and a mother of German ancestry. She is also a Christian, of a variety often dismissively described as “conservative.” You should judge for yourself what precisely that entails in her case. “The Indians were foreign to the story of Job, as far as it had been understood,” she writes. “But—if ever there was trial and suffering, 6,000 years didn’t matter.” I’m grateful to Turtle Point Press for publishing this wonderfully idiosyncratic book—and doing so in such elegant form.
- from ERB Contributing Editor John Wilson’s
review of this book for First Things
Read our 2020 interview with Diane Glancy and Daniel Taylor…
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