Reviewers of Marilyn Johnston’s first poetry collection, Silk Fist Songs, have been enthusiastic. Clare Rossini has said, “How is it that death, its brutal emptying out, provokes our ripest understandings; that grief, like poetic form, conditions and frees the heart into song? These are the mysteries at the heart of Marilyn Johnston’s beautifully realized collection, which was begotten in the loss of a father and brother. But how much life is in these poems, in their depiction of family, of childhood memory, of evolving love…! Ms. Johnston’s sensibility has all the lush realism of one of those wonderful 17th Century Dutch portrait painters: one wants to reach out and touch the page-become-canvas, so vividly do these poems embody their characters. But—another mystery—it’s her verbal precision that produces the allusiveness of Ms. Johnston’s music, allowing the poems to pierce through to the great powers see-sawing through our lives. In one poem she tells of the painstaking care with which the “Lord of Broken Things” would restore salvaged items ‘by hand, or mind, or magic.’ I say, praise that Lord, patron deity of this meticulously crafted and profoundly moving book.” For his part, Doug Anderson has commented that “Marilyn Johnston’s poems are written exactly where feeling becomes language, as if conceived in that moment just before sleep when we let down our guard and open to our own wholeness. They are beautifully crafted, but even more importantly, the poet has been relentless in her avoidance of the false note. These poems are true, and human, and ones you’ll want to live with. This is a very strong first book.” Marilyn E. Johnston was born and raised in Hartford in a lineage of Connecticut Irish farmers on her mother’s side and Illinois Finnish immigrants on her father‘s. Recipient of an MA in English from Trinity College, for many years she pursued a career in insurance communications, a career she abandoned in order to concentrate on the writing of poetry. In the past decade, her work has received five Pushcart Prize nominations and has appeared in numerous literary journals including The Worcester Review, Atlanta Review, South Carolina Review, and Poet Lore. Her chapbook Against Disappearance was published as finalist for the 2001 Redgreene Press Poetry Prize. Commitments to poetry and to community have led her to work in the Bloomfield Public Library, where she directs a poetry series presenting area writers to an ever-expanding audience. With her husband, Ray, she lives on an old farm in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Click here to read four sample poems. Click here to read ancillary material in the Seminar Room. |
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BOOK STATISTICS ISBN: 978-0-9798451-1-6
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SPIRAL RIDE A fat rubber tire appears overnight,
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PLAYGROUND, AFTER CHASE You are not supposed to run with boys when Billy leaps the divide and tackles his freckled-face, light-outlined frame, arms His delirious teeth, sky-aimed laugh, Wide-eyed look into wide-eyed look,
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POKER FACE Saturday mid-day quiet, alone with him |
GAME’S END Better not to know what’s ending “Dreamer” you had already dubbed me Through the swaying net I see you waiting, of stiff webs our hearts back up, from side to side, the ascent When the sun dropped a final time
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SEMESTER BREAK She opens the window to the spring night air with a rhinestone center. blows the last smoke stream rising barricade of papers and books, in his spartan room, caught fight ended, sides squared off. She believes
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CANCER WARD I’ve brought him poems, packeted, sealed When at twilight, dwindling In our family
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