Poetry That Finds the Holy in the Hard Places

This Side of the Sky: 101 Poems and Scriptures for the Hungry, Hopeful, and Homesick by Laura Wifler

Laura Wifler came to poetry late and, by her own account, reluctantly. For much of her life, she thought the form was obscure, overly complicated … and simply not for her. Then, while homeschooling her children, she encountered poems that were clear without being simplistic, beautiful without requiring a decoder ring. She began writing alongside her kids and discovered that she had found her form.

Wilfler’s backstory makes This Side of the Sky: 101 Poems and Scriptures for the Hungry, Hopeful, and Homesick all the more remarkable. Her debut collection has the linguistic surprise and imaginative confidence of a much more seasoned poet. Her work is accessible, but never trite or flat. Again and again, a familiar feeling or ordinary moment is transformed by an image, a metaphor, a sudden shift in scale.

Reframing Real-World Concerns

It would be easy to call these inspirational poems, but that skips over much of what makes them effective. Wifler spends a great deal of time in harder places: grief, shame, anxiety, self-loathing, disappointment, bodily insecurity, exhausted motherhood and the smaller frustrations that can fill a day.

In “The Howl of Heaven,” grief is allowed to be angry, disorienting and physically draining. There is no rush to say the right thing or smooth sorrow into a lesson. The poem turns toward hope only at the end, with the reminder that the present moment is not the whole story.

“The Bad Thing” takes up that question more directly. Sickness may produce compassion, job loss courage, disability humility, failure resilience. Wifler doesn’t ask readers to be grateful for suffering itself. She turns our focus to what may grow around it, or emerge from it.

That movement runs through the book’s five-act structure, which begins with “Acknowledge the Ache” and gradually makes its way toward promise, surrender, perseverance and the hope of Heaven.

Some of the collection’s strongest moments, though, are much smaller. In “Maybe It Is Like Touching God,” Wifler notices a mug of coffee, a dog asleep across her lap, children at the piano, apples on the counter and the indentation in a pillow where her husband will sleep. Even Paul’s request for his cloak and books becomes evidence that ordinary comforts are not spiritually trivial.

Relationships with Others and Self

Marriage gets similarly vivid treatment in “Paris,” where lost luggage, croissants and a spontaneous trip become a meditation on a love that feels too large for the word itself. Looking down at the Atlantic, Wifler imagines jellyfish living without hearts, unable to feel what she feels for her husband. It is a strange, beautiful leap, and exactly the kind of moment that gives these poems their charge.

She writes just as candidly about the body. In “Stunner,” years of hiding perceived imperfections give way to a different measure of worth: coaching a child, carrying a friend’s grief, rocking someone in the dark, offering kindness to a stranger, standing beneath the stars.

Nature often helps her find her way out of a closed-in emotional moment. In “Mulberries,” berry-stained mouths, minnows in the shallows, bluebells by the creek and a sparrow in the oaks coexist with “the groans of the weary world.” Beauty does not cancel pain. It simply reminds us that pain is not the only thing there.

Each poem is paired with Scripture, and the verses rarely feel tacked on. Often the poem makes the biblical passage feel more immediate, while the passage deepens what the poem has just shown us.

This Side of the Sky is unapologetically Christian, but its power comes from how firmly it remains rooted in actual life: bodies, families, grief, wonder, failure and love. Wifler’s poems do not escape the ordinary. They move further into it and, in doing so, find grace already waiting there.