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

"Both ode and elegy, Molly Johnsen's Everything Alive is one of the most moving, bittersweet portraits of living I've read in a long time. An expansive epistolary mode and direct address turn these poems toward 'everything alive' in the speaker's world: family, beloveds, even the epilepsy that resurfaces after a traumatic accident. Every letter is a love letter, and this book regards our precarious world head-on with fierce, rigorous love. Look here, the details in these poems insist on singing: there's life yet. I love this book." --Margaret Ray, author of Good Grief, the Ground

"'I'm an emergency, '" announces a poem in Molly Johnsen's smart, chilling, and tender collection Everything Alive. These poems invite us into hospitals and tunnels, into school rooms and domestic spaces, exploring trauma, time, and the often fragile links between body and self. Johnsen's writing is wrenching, clever, and dryly wise, investigating which wounds can be healed and which will endure, in a world where 'it's just hard to figure out what's dead and why.'" --Natalie Shapero, author of Stay Dead

"Molly Johnsen has accomplished what I feel is a fairly rare and difficult thing: to write a really, really good book of poems. Clear-sighted and moving, the poems that comprise Everything Alive arrive at discoveries and insights that are often startling, surprising, and honest: they bear the thorn of something seen with clarity and rendered honestly--of truth. The book to me is about, in part, our fundamental aloneness. And in poems that acknowledge that fact but embody a constant reaching toward the world and other people, they help us feel less alone." --Grady Chambers, author of North American Stadiums and Great Disasters

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.