All I Feel Is Rivers: Dervish Essays

All I Feel is Rivers is a collection of a new hybrid writing that, though spiritually akin to prose poems, retains an essayistic form.

After several life-changing trips to Turkey, Robert Vivian took up a deep study of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, poet, and founder of the religious order that performs the now-famous dervish dance. Vivian’s fascination seeped into his writing, and his newly conceived dervish essays reflect the dynamic movement and ancient symbolism of the ritual dance with wild lyricism, sometimes breathless cadences, and mesmerizing unspooling.
              
Utterly fearless in their passionate avowals of life’s many manifestations, these essays showcase the surprising connectivity between the sacred and profane, uncovered by associative drifting. Vivian’s essays take on grief and loss, the natural world and climate, spirituality and ecstasy, all while pushing the boundaries of what prose can do.
              

Robert Vivian is a professor of English and creative writing at Alma College in Michigan and teaches as a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of four novels as well as two essay collections, Cold Snap as Yearning and The Least Cricket of Evening, all available from the University of Nebraska Press, as well as the collection of dervish essays, Immortal Soft-Spoken.