And the strongest poem of the trio, “Nuns in the Quarterlies,” paints a revealing portrait of mid-century nun-poets.

The editors called her “one of a lively and generously gifted group of young Catholic poets.” “Tumbleweed” ponders the “mobile American par excellence,” and appreciates how “rootlessness” is “its survival.” In “A Kind of Resurrection,” Gilbert deftly paces single-sentence stanzas. The issue featured three poems by Gilbert, born Madeline DeFrees, who taught at Holy Names College in Spokane. In this issue alone, luminaries like William Stafford, Donald Hall, Thom Gunn, and Philip Levine published alongside lesser-known writers like Allyn Wood and Sister Mary Gilbert, a Sister of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. Founded the previous year, the magazine had already published Anne Sexton, Stanley Kunitz, and Philip Larkin. Although the magazine was based in Seattle, its writers hailed from across the country. Ants huddle in the center of the magazine’s cover, which is a reproduction of the painting “Ant War,” by Oregon-born artist Morris Graves. One day, during my archival research, I came across the Winter 1960-61 issue of the quarterly literary magazine Poetry Northwest. Yet more often than not, the poems were stylistic, satirical, and subversive. I say that without disdain these women wrote with measured skill. Some of the poems were devotional and traditional.

I wrote my new book, The Habit of Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-century America, because I kept on coming across poems by nuns in these magazine archives. If you want to understand the contours of American literature for the past 100 years, there is no better place to watch the evolution of writers than in these magazines, where future legends begin their careers with one-line biographical notes. There’s something tenuous and beautiful about these often shoestring, sometimes short-lived, always ambitious publications.

I spend a lot of time in the archives of literary magazines.

Wayward lives book