Pascale Petit is very busy. Her sixth collection, Fauverie, has recently come out from Seren, and Petit is taken up with readings. When I initially wrote to her, she was tucked away in a writers’ retreat in France, working on the next collection. In late October, we sat at one of the flimsy tables d...

Religious language leans on the apophatic, on the idea that cosmic reality might elude our words. ‘We live on a little island of the articulable,’ writes the Christian novelist Marilynne Robinson, ‘which we tend to mistake for reality itself.’ Gilead, her second book, is narrated by Rev. Ames, a dyi...