Everything Alive - by Molly Johnsen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

With desperate longing and raw vulnerability--but also surprising humor--Molly Johnsen's debut collection Everything Alive confronts trauma and disability like long-lost relatives. Johnsen relies on the power and shortcomings of language to highlight the ways "we are manhandled by mortality." From a therapist's office to a cave in Italy, to the raspberry patch in her childhood backyard, the borders of the material world switch from roadblocks to entryways and back. Johnsen's work is grounded in precise imagery and keen observation, with cycles of family, trauma, and language at its heart. The reader is literally invited in as Johnsen shifts from begging her brain and body for mercy to forcefully reclaiming her selfhood.

Review Quotes

"The body's fragility, and its surprising strength, are at the core of Molly Johnsen's Everything Alive. Johnsen's clear-eyed perspective on life and death manifests in her speaker's willingness to be vulnerable. As she states in "Love, Me," 'curve a C around me./Come here. Like this./Make of us a nest, Love./Show me my body's not/empty, ' Johnsen is unafraid to ask for what she needs to sustain her. Relationships, filial and romantic, tentative and enduring, are at the core of this brave book whose poems run the gamut of what is required to endure. Trauma may be the catalyst for much of what exists in these pages, but resilience and hope are what resonate." --Christopher Kennedy, author of Clues from the Animal Kingdom and Isabella Gardner Poetry Award winner Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death

About the Author

Molly Johnsen is a Vermont-based writer and teacher. Her work has appeared in the Nashville Review, Indiana Review, Cider Press Review, and others. Everything Alive was selected as a semi-finalist for the Black Lawrence Press St. Lawrence Book Award. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University.