The author studied at Penn State, where he played no football, and Iowa, where he skirted the Workshop. He found God, lysergic acid, and despair in the Sixties, survived by getting that era into his art - some nineteen novels, twelve verse plays and more poetry than Browning. The Will to Christ contains ambition, a paean to bipolar disorder, four dramatic monologues by major players in the genesis and termination of the only messiah he’s known, poetry on a sustained level that is often frightening. While the author has two other books and over a hundred poems in print, another ninety wouldn’t offer a tenth of what this great long - poem rewards in continued reading. Here is an epic, twenty-two years in the making, that summons even Milton. The latter would be clearly horrified.