An Imperfect Roundness

What a fresh, original voice! Melody Newey Johnson’s poems look inward and outward at the same time and therefore sing with insights about her journey through the canyons, fields, and mountains of a well-lived, thoughtful life. Her metaphors illustrate this simultaneity: her belly is a moon full of baby ; she trusts the sky’s billion years of blue . Poems as tight and spare as Emily Dickinson’s offer the same kind of depth: beneath each carefully cut, honed surface lie extraordinary thought, faith, and imagination for readers to follow. Susan Howe, Author of Stone Spirits and Salt, and an AML Award-winner in poetry Perched somewhere between George Herbert and Mary Oliver, Melody Newey Johnson’s poems offer a sustained celebration of heaven in ordinary . They quietly and gently fold experience in on itself, bringing out the richness that had slipped our view, even though it had been there all along. Jason Kerr, Assistant Professor of English, Brigham Young University

Christ’s broken body wrapped in a linen chrysalis. Childbirth: a miracle startling as the Nile turned to blood. A collision with modernity, shattering as a motorcycle crash. The poems in Melody Newey Johnson’s An Imperfect Roundness shows us God in life’s earthquakes, fires, and stillnesses.
James Goldberg, Author of The Five Books of Jesus and Remember the Revolution