In Absolutes We Seek Each Other

Winner of the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest in 2014 Johnson’s poems, full of quiet and gracious observation, are acts of kinship-in-strangeness with the natural world. Even the slightest creatures are alive with vision. –Joanna Klink For a moment, reader, as you orient yourself in one of Jessica Johnson’s poems, you might classify a scene as quiet and scientific, or moody, wet, and metrical; then a shift and, god, it’s luminous and grief-struck and haunting and it’s yours. The linked poems in the book’s first section are a feat of beauty: transformation and lost innocence set in a glimmering laboratory. The second section of ocean dwellers, anatomies, and sea-soaked lyrics is equally remarkable. Jessica Johnson is a true discovery. –Kathleen Flenniken