Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown by Jill McCabe Johnson

(1 customer review)

$19.99

 

In one of her essays, Audre Lorde brilliantly redefines the erotic as the capacity to fully experience every dimension of life, from the sensual to the political. Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown marvelously illustrates Lorde’s vision. In poems that look at the toughness and tenderness of the body, the joy and dread of consciousness, and the complexities of the intimate and the social, Jill McCabe Johnson continually reaffirms “the lure of thrum, blossom, and burn.” As moving as they are wry and steely, Johnson’s poems are especially urgent in their explorations of the experiences of women in the world, and in their explorations of the psychic violence that pervades much of our daily awareness of contemporary life. Full of vivacity and brokenness, Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown is poetry that we very much need now.

–Rick Barot, author of Chord, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, the UNT Rilke Prize, and the Thom Gunn Award

 

Jill McCabe Johnson walks through the world aware of both privilege and peril. The pace of her perambulations allows her to exercise (pun fully intended) her keen powers of observation, her formal dexterity, and her considerable lyrical gifts. Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown is full of street smarts, hard-earned wisdom, and an emotional depth that shows us how to face all our revolutions, how to survive with “deliverance and grace.”

–Grace Bauer – author of The Women At The Well and Nowhere All At Once

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

 

Description

Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown

by Jill McCabe Johnson

$19.99, Full-length, paper

978-1-63534-076-1

2017

Jill McCabe Johnson writes in the tradition of the French Medieval “Chanson d’Aventure,” or Song of Adventure, where a writer walks for immersion, enlightenment, and inspiration. Many of these poems were written on a self-directed walking and writing trek through France in the weeks leading up to and during the ISIS attacks on Paris. Johnson’s first poetry book, Diary of the One Swelling Sea (MoonPath, 2013), won the Nautilus Silver Award in Poetry. Johnson is author of the nonfiction chapbook Borderlines (Sweet, 2016), and series editor for the Being What Makes You anthologies from the University of Nebraska Gender Programs.

 

1 review for Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown by Jill McCabe Johnson

  1. Jami Macarty (verified owner)

    10 (!) lines into the first poem–“Marche a l’Arc de Triomphe”–of Jill McCabe Johnson’s REVOLUTIONS WE’D HOPED WE’D OUTGROWN:

    “The instinct to connect with animus–
    to encircle and tame with one’s legs”

    there was a terrific feeling of ground materializing beneath me. At that point, I felt my reader self settle in, as one does when taken by the hand of a confident, humble, learned guide, who’s traveled this path before. The path on which JMJ guides us is a life path–“Our slow circuit” of illness, those medical, and those from the -isms that define our times, from the personal to societal griefs, all the while deftly aware of the pitfalls of both the “treacherous poisons” and “everlasting scent of miel.”

    This is a rare book in its honesty!

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