Inheritance


Book Description

Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self’s struggle with definition and assumption.




Johnson the Poet


Book Description

Through this combination of close reading and contextualized analysis, the book explores Johnson's complicated attitude toward the prevailing conventions of eighteenth-century poetics and the enterprise of writing poetry."--BOOK JACKET.




In Full Velvet


Book Description

These poems, likened to Elizabeth Bishop's, are about desire, love, seeing, gender, difference, ecology, queerness in the "natural" world, loss, LGBTQ lineage, and its community. They contain a sinuous, shape-shifting quality that makes her explorations of sex and selfhood all the more resonant. Jenny Johnson won a 2015 Whiting Fellowship. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.




This Waiting for Love


Book Description

Cousin of novelist Dorothy West and friend of Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson (1905-1995) first gained literary prominence when James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost selected three of her poems for prizes in a 1926 competition. This volume brings together the poetry and a selection of correspondence by this poet of the Harlem Renaissance.




The Incognito Lounge


Book Description

A reissuing of The Incognito Lounge, poetry by Denis Johnson.




The Caregiver


Book Description

The Caregiver is Caroline Johnson's first full-length publication. It includes 50 poems that were inspired by the 15 years she devoted to taking care of her aging parents. The gathering includes free verse, lyrical poems, prose poetry and some formal verse. Many of the poems won contests and have been previously published in online print journals and anthologies. The poems touch on the topic of grieving but go beyond and focus on the many difficulties a caregiver experiences—both emotional and physical—yet also recognize the spiritual gifts that come with helping a loved one. Caregiving is a significant issue for our times and will only become more important as our population ages.







Little Climates


Book Description

Poetry. California Interest. The seemingly placid surfaces of LITTLE CLIMATES lure the reader into the mystery of what swims underneath. In her debut collection, L. A. Johnson examines the disparate spaces humans occupy in relationships--together and separately, alone and as unit. For even in a love union, each individual still inhabits their own space of mystery and wonder; their pasts, how they've changed, how they dream of the present: these are the little climates.




Red Summer


Book Description

This haunting debut collection explores a rash of race riots that swept the United States during the summer of 1919. With a tender lyrical quality reminiscent of the blues, Johnson moves through trauma and personal catastrophe to champion the endurance of the human spirit.




Jubilee


Book Description

Poetry. JUBILEE won the 2005 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. "These luminous poems depict a world I never knew--or know as a child and since forgot--and they do so with the authority of a totally mature voice. The artistry that unifies JUBILEE is so perfect it is almost invisible. Altogether an amazing debut"--Philip Levine. "In JUBILEE, the effects of gravity are reversed in order to capture how the world weighs on the mind...These often deceptively measured prose poems critique not only their own form, but the structures, the foundations, of family, spirituality, and identity which we often fail to examine. Each self-portrait tells us as much about the environment as it reveals about the subject occupying them--the poet creating with a small mirror in one hand, a pen/camera/brush/etching knife in the other"--Kyle G. Dargan.