Books by Kimberly Johnson
Fatal: Poems
Fatal reflects on the “small and common” events that shock and wound us, contemplating how we can bear human care, knowing the risks. In Fatal, her most personal collection yet, Kimberly Johnson reflects on ways in which we are imperiled, this life dealing out even in its “small and common” events so many shocks and wounds that we are marked by our having lived it. These poems explore our enduring commitment to care for our small, costly holdings―all those vital, fatal loves that make us vulnerable―and contemplates the question of how we can bear the caring, knowing the risk.
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Leviathan With a Hook
Kimberly Johnson's dazzling first collection is rooted in the land and language she inherits, then claims for her own. Informed throughout by Milton's Paradise Lost, Johnson's poems burst with the flora and fauna of a magnificently imagined landscape, and gain their power from the incomparable language she uses to describe it. This language is itself an organism in her writing, grown from its own seed, its "vowels blooming like necessary globes/with sharp, consonantal edges." Her voice is wholly new and unique; Leviathan with a Hook heralds the arrival of one of the new standard-bearers of American verse.
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Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry
by Jay Hopler, Kimberly Johnson
A diverse and imaginative selection of works from the long tradition of devotional poetry in English
Before the Door of God traces the development of devotional English-language poetry from its origins in ancient hymnody to its current twenty-first-century incarnations. The poems in this volume demonstrate not only that devotional poetry—poetry that speaks to the divine—remains in vigorous practice but also that the tradition reaches back to the very origins of poetry in English.
Featuring the work of poets over a three-thousand-year period, Before the Door of God places the devotional lyric in its cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts. The volume traces the various influences on this tradition and identifies features that persist in devotional lyric poetry across centuries, cultures, and stylistic differences. To scholars, literary professionals, and general readers who find delight in fine poetry, this anthology offers much to contemplate and discuss.
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Uncommon Prayer: Poems (Karen and Michael Braziller Books)
In this stirring third collection, bursting with spoken and unspoken desire, Kimberly Johnson continues her ecstatic intertwining of the liturgical and the rugged landscape of the American West. Uncommon Prayer is a book about desire, and about the ways in which desire can and cannot be expressed, contained, or controlled by language. Invoking the structural organization of the liturgical hours, the calendar, and the alphabet, Uncommon Prayer explores how external forms might compensate for the incommunicability of human want―that is, how the parts of expression that aren’t found in dictionary definitions might help to make up for what our words never quite manage to express.
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