In his own Confessions, St. Augustine wrote, “ The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.” This Is the Story of His Life is just this: a rite of reconciliation, a penance of prayers that might pull a new order out of the chaos of any ordinary, twenty-first-century Self. The aspiration: a new set of psalms in the voice of a ventriloquist, shouting into the residual wind God used to exhale the whole world. The realization: one small poem or mantra-recited, re-seen, re-made, over and over and over again, can somehow make this a life worth living.