Leviathan with a Hook
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Persea Books, 2002
“It is a beautiful book, and an unusual one … Its remarkable lucidity, its seductive energy, its lushness, and its music form a vision in which the real and the transcendental are indistinguishable.”
— Mark Strand
“No other poet writing today gives as she does, like a spirit of harvest, so much of the fragrant, astonishing, living and dying world, and makes it so sweetly and sternly known.”
— Allen Grossman
“Wild, inventive, hungry, celebratory … These poems fear neither glory nor ruin.”
— Rosanna Warren
Read a review of Leviathan with a Hook in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Read a review of Leviathan with a Hook in The Yale Review.
Excerpts from Leviathan with a Hook
Winter enfolds us, a fabric of tenterhooks.
Sunlight from everywhere whitens the room.
My south wind, my wingspan,
how can we unwinter ourselves?
(from “Squall Line”)
…Seasonal
the ritual, pinching aphids as I kneel
upturned, squinting sunward for the sleek
daredevil flight, for the promise of the climb,
of sunlit wings, of plain things charged
and fulgent, of one perfect
performance, of earth as it is in heaven.
(from “Pater Noster”)
"Dazzling ... She writes with Milton open at her elbow but with the real dirt of a real Utah under her fingertips."
— The Yale Review
"It is a beautiful book, and an unusual one ... Its remarkable lucidity, its seductive energy, its lushness, and its music form a vision in which the real and the transcendental are indistinguishable."
— Mark Strand
"Kimberly Johnson's superbly colourful, rhythmic and readable new translation...finds a way of feeding the Virgilian strain of English verse – from Milton to Wordsworth and beyond – back into her lines." — The Independent (UK)