Everything Alive: Poems

With desperate longing and raw vulnerability—but also surprising humor—Molly Johnsen’s debut collection 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 image...