Walter Wangerin 
The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible 

The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible is a volume of poems divided into three parts. The three parts are bound together by a brace of persistent and developing themes, as well as by the repetition (and the development) of language, metaphor, and imagery.
Part 1 presents various characters (mostly African American) confronting death.
The poems in part 2 are spoken by an unnamed narrator about his cancer. My cancer, actually, and my experiences.
Parts 2 and 3 both descend into silence.
Part 3 is a radical reworking of the ancient Mesopotamian epic loosely known as The Songs of Heaven and Hell. The poems are not a translation, though each derives from a separate song, and each uses the characters, the events, the worldview, and the stark imagery of Babylon in the third century BCE. In many respects, these poems have the prosody of the biblical psalms.

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Walter Wangerin Jr. has won the National Book Award, the
New York Times Best Children’s Book of the Year Award, and several Gold Medallion Awards, including best fiction awards for both
The Book of God (1997) and
Paul: A Novel (2000). Wangerin was speaker for the
Lutheran Vespers radio program from 1994 to January 2005, and prior to joining the faculty at Valparaiso University, he served as an inner-city pastor in Evansville, Indiana, for sixteen years. The author of more than forty books, Wangerin lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he is Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University.