Sage Hill Press is delighted to release the debut collection of Marci Rae Johnson, our Powder Horn Prize winner.
Contest final judge Christopher Howell says. “This book is about time, time as measured, experienced, prefigured, remembered, projected, thought of, not thought of; time as it inhabits language, dreams, visions, desire; how it relates to physical movement both in and of the world; how it is framed. All of this is conducted through the window of a real or imagined “On the Road” experience during which two people, lovers, try to see themselves and each other, in spite of the persistent change brought on by shifts in both temporal and spatial context, and the expansion and contraction of the frame.”
And from Alan Michael Parker, “Reflective and refractive, the poems in this shimmering collection offer us the promise of indeterminacy as solace, in a world where the Unknown and the Possible are one and the same. In Johnson’s unerring poems, what we don’t know seems a version of what we might wish—“maybe this is where / we see something beautiful,” she writes. Traveler, trust these fine poems, and this fine poet: profound comforts lie here, in the arms of language.”