Books by Devin Johnston

Creaturely and Other Essays

by Devin Johnston

"The author puts forward a bracing theory of partial empathy....Johnston's searching book of thought-probes goes a long way toward allowing the reader the grounding that would allow him to make empathic contacts with the animals over which he ponders....Each time another animal becomes extinct a special and irretrievable way of looking at the world is gone....Perhaps the more people that read this book, the more this absence would be poignantly felt."—The Brooklyn Rail
"Creaturely, like its subjects, eludes definition. It's a book of exquisite essays—or are they prose poems—that tessellate into something larger: a meditation, perhaps, or a vision. Johnston's subject is at once the absolute otherness of the creatures with whom we share the world's everyday spaces—dogs, owls, mice, squirrels, crows—and the worth of our attempts to get to know them. Modest, calm, and beautiful, this is an exceptional book."—Robert Macfarlane
Devin Johnston teaches at St. Louis University. He was named a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Sources, published by Turtle Point Press.

Mosses and Lichens Poems

by Devin Johnston

A new collection from the author of Traveler

Not days of anger
but days of mild congestion,
infants of inconstant sorrow,
days of foam in gutters,
blossoms and snow
mingling where they fall,
a spring of cold profusion.

If a rolling stone gathers no moss, the poems in Devin Johnston’s Mosses and Lichens attend to what accretes over time, as well as to what erodes. They often take place in the middle of life’s journey, at the edge of the woods, at the boundary between human community and wild spaces. Following Ovid, they are poems of subtle transformation and transfer. They draw on early blues and rivers, on ironies and uncertainties, guided by enigmatic signals: “an orange blaze that marks no trail.” From image to image, they render fleeting experiences with etched precision. As Ange Mlinko has observed of Johnston's work, “Each poem holds in balance a lapidary concision and utter lushness of vowel-work,” forming a distinctive music.

Far-Fetched Poems

by Devin Johnston

A collection from one of contemporary American poetry's finest craftsmen

Through birdcalls and ancient songs, rain patter and a child's scribble, the poems in Far-Fetched "sound the empty space / to test how long / how far." They follow the contours of Appalachian hillsides, Missouri river bends, and remote Australian coastlines, tuning language to landscape. They register emotional life with great care; this is a work of fierce and delicate attention to the world. It is also poetry meant to be heard, alert to the pleasures of sound. As August Kleinzahler has observed, "In Devin Johnston's poetry every syllable is alive; the vowels and consonants combine to make a distinctive, lovely, austere music."

Far-Fetched: Poems

by Devin Johnston

A new collection from one of contemporary American poetry's finest craftsmen

Through birdcalls and ancient songs, rain patter and a child's scribble, the poems in Far-Fetched "sound the empty space / to test how long / how far." They follow the contours of Appalachian hillsides, Missouri river bends, and remote Australian coastlines, tuning language to landscape. They register emotional life with great care; this is a work of fierce and delicate attention to the world. It is also poetry meant to be heard, alert to the pleasures of sound. As August Kleinzahler has observed, "In Devin Johnston's poetry every syllable is alive; the vowels and consonants combine to make a distinctive, lovely, austere music."

Traveler: Poems

by Devin Johnston

The poems in Devin Johnston's Traveler cross great distances, from the Red Hills of Kansas to the Rough Bounds of the Scottish Highlands, following weather patterns, bird migrations, and ocean voyages. Less literally, these poems move through translations and protean transformations. Their subjects are often next to nothing in several senses: cloud shadows racing across a valley before dusk, the predawn expectation of a child's birth, or the static-electric charge of clothing fabric. Throughout, Johnston offers vivid glimpses of the phenomenal world: "He describes objects with his hands and his eyes, noting texture, heft, and fit" (Boston Review). Equally, one finds a keen attention to sound in the patterning of subtle rhymes and rhythms, demonstrating "care and precision with line and pause" (Poetry).

Telepathy

by Devin Johnston

From Publishers Weekly Johnston works along revitalized lyric lines with a distinctive sense of rhyme and take on love and loss: Memory marks/ time in changing/ station, accent/ or form of work// yet has no finer/ calibration./ And so a crack/ runs through this cup. In six sections of finely wrought but always lucid and luminous work, Johnston takes up Beckettis distinction between Molloy & Mollose, sings Belated Songs and makes Insinuations A trembling horizon/ of elocution.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Review Telepathy has an unnerving, foreign beauty. These richly allusive, densely written poems linger at the edge of memory... -- Elizabeth Robinson, Traffic 2003.1 (Spring & Summer)flashy but not without substance, sophisticated but never distractingly cerebral, painstakingly structured and curious of the world outside the poet-self. -- Ethan Paquin, Boston Review 27.6 (December 2002)

Aversions

by Devin Johnston

To be averse, to turn one's eyes away, is an act that chills, suggesting not only irrevocable but also unforeseeable consequence. And what we do not see, we so often fear. In ancient Rome, rites of aversion were performed as sacred rituals. But, as Johnston explains, such "rituals involved not the invocation of heavenly spirits, but the placation of ghosts." While the poems in this collection assay a very broad range of subjects, Johnston demonstrates in all of them an awareness of what enormous challenges constitute the turning toward―or away from―the many faces of experience. And at the core of this work is an astute, passionate, empathic examination of our use of language as an active placation of ghosts. "[T]hese forms are only forms // fulfilled, as you are now // no more than this-a tone." Paradoxically, Johnston demonstrates the ways that these ghosted forms nonetheless can offer a music intensely, eerily immediate. Here the breadth and complexity of subject matter and allusion, the deftly drawn images (some in full relief, others sketched in minimal silhouette against a sharply contrasting background), the surprising alliances and complications of emotion and idea, all make it impossible for a reader to turn his or her eyes away.

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics Fall 2024 Volume 5, Issue 1

by Ange Mlinko, David Grossman, Sean Wilentz, Ramachandra Guha, Sanford Levinson, William Deresiewicz, Steven B. Smith, Sohrab Ahmari, Jack M. Balkin, Ryan Ruby, Devin Johnston, Erica McAlpine, Jonathan Zimmerman, Katherine C. Epstein, Mark Edmondson, Annie Abrams

Liberties is an independent quarterly journal of ideas that publishes serious, stylish, and controversial essays about significant issues in culture and politics.

In the Fall 2024 issue of Liberties: Sean Wilentz bluntly defines the stakes of this election; Katherine C. Epstein laments the death of research and its consequences for our culture; Ryan Ruby presides over the unlikely meeting of Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka; Mark Edmondson diagnoses the fever in contemporary politics; Sohrab Ahmari exposes the sordid depths to which rightwing extremism has sunk; Jonathan Zimmerman pushes back against the opponents of higher education; Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson argue that "We The People" is not as clear as it looks; William Deresiewicz describes what is absent from social relations in America; Ramachandra Guha introduces the founding poet of the environmental movement, Rabindranath Tagore; Ange Mlinko resurrects the art of Amy Clampitt; Steven B. Smith reveals what is truly revolutionary about our sixteenth president; in Teaching Ellison by Annie Abrams: A high school teacher, a great writer, and how to live; Celeste Marcus on a film, a great director, and the rise of fascism; Leon Wieseltier examines the grotesque intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism and Vanceism; and new poetry from David Grossman, Erica McAlpine and Devin Johnston.

Liberties features essays from leading op-ed writers and scholars, award-winning and well-known non-fiction and fiction writers, next generation rising talents, and poets from around the world.

There's a reason why cultural warriors, political leaders, opinion makers, and engaged citizens from across political and cultural spectrum read and cherish Liberties.