himself, however, have distinguished his work from neo-formalism. David Biespeil in American Poetry Review wrote, "if Wiman is a formalist, he's the kind who ditches the grandiose". Wiman's poetry takes its reference points from lived experience rather than from any literary tradition. Of his own taste, Wiman writes in Ambition and Survival "more and more what I want from the poetry I read is some density of experience, some sense that a whole life is being brought to bear both on and in language". Wiman's poetry is characterized by multiple possible and intended readings, and metaphors which either are derived from an absence or space or undergo an evolution throughout the poem. One technique Wiman uses to communicate dual intended readings, is through repetition and scrupulous variation of punctuation and line-breaks. Thematic preoccupations of Wiman's poetry include the absence of God and difficulties and necessities of encountering the world whether with faith or without. Omar Sabbagh compares Wiman to Simone Weil and Jürgen Moltmann saying "Whether we call it 'affliction', 'the void', or what have you, these Christian thinkers were eminently modernist in seeing God, not as necessity, but as 'contingency'." Wiman's poetry has been compared stylistically to Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, but in an interview on his own influences, Wiman said, "for sheer sound, though, I'd give more credit—or blame—to Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, and Robert Frost". Awards and honors 2010 Commonwealth Prize from the English Speaking Union 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award (Poetry) finalist for Once in the West 2014 Balcones Fiction Prize (Poetry) winner for Once in the West 2016 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry Works Poetry Collections The Long Home (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), poetry, 96 pages, Hard Night (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), poetry, 96 pages, Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), poetry, 112 pages, Once In The West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), poetry, 128 pages, Hammer Is The Prayer: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), poetry, 224 pages, Survival Is A Style (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), poetry, 112 pages, Translations Stolen Air: The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (Ecco, 2012), poetry, 128 pages, Anthologies Prose Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (Farrar, Straus and