SOURCE: “Survivalist Selves,” in Kenyon Review, Vol. XX, Nos. 3-4, Summer-Fall, 1998, pp. 180-89.

In the following excerpt, Wojahn offers a favorable evaluation of Black Zodiac.

When the Coptic monks of Nag Hammadi concealed their sacred papyri in clay jars and hid them in caves for safekeeping, they did so in fear of persecution. They were, after all, classified as heretics by the church. The monks surely had no idea that it would take some eighteen centuries for their trove of Gnostic texts to see once again the light of day. And they scarcely could have imagined that the Nag Hammadi tractates, with their weirdly eclectic mixture of Christian, Judaic, Manichean, and Neoplatonic traditions, would have found a particularly avid readership among American poets of the 1990s. Charles Wright and Brenda Hillman are a case in point: both have acknowledged James M. Robinson's edition of The Nag Hammadi Library...