Everything Alive: Poems

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.