Poetry
Uncommon Prayer
Persea Books, 2014
“A most welcome addition to this ongoing, probably neverending pursuit of what Eliot himself called ‘next year’s words.’ ”
— Mark Jarman
“It is compelling the whole way through and for a long time after.”
— David Thacker
Read a review of Uncommon Prayer in Spoon River Poetry Review.
Read a review of Uncommon Prayer in Pleiades.
Read a review of Uncommon Prayer in 15 Bytes.
Read a review of Uncommon Prayer in Poetry Northwest.
A Metaphorical God
Persea Books, 2008
“She’s a polyphonic prestidigitator, a virtuoso of the vibrant heart, and — stunning in our fallen world — a genuine metaphysician, with all the healing aptitude the word implies.”
— Linda Gregerson
“Dazzling….She writes with Milton open at her elbow but with the real dirt of a real Utah under her fingertips.”
— The Yale Review
Read a review of A Metaphorical God in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Read a review of A Metaphorical God in Michigan Quarterly Review.
Leviathan with a Hook
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.
Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days: A Bilingual Edition
Uncommon Prayer
"With the fine artistry, precision, erudition, wit, and lexical magic we have come to expect from Johnson." — Michael Sowder, 15 Bytes
Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England
"Kimberly Johnson's dual identity as scholar and poet animates this strikingly original book—not only in its limpid, lively prose, but also in its resonant reappraisal of a seemingly familiar subject. Early modern devotional poetry has often been analyzed in terms of its theological and ecclesiological contexts; the real strength and purchase of Johnson's book lies in its integration of this contextual material with a searching investigation of the formal strategies of poetry as such."— Molly Murray, Columbia University
Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry
"The painstaking work of two poet-scholars, Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson, the collection promises to be a crucial source text for scholars, a course text for students and a manual for seekers who wish to find prayers that fit their condition and cast of mind." — Cleveland Plain Dealer
Virgil's Georgics: A Poem of the Land
"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)