Pine: (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series)

Poems that travel through time and terrain, seeking solace in the raw physicality of the world. To grieve is to search. In Pine, Jonathan Johnson's poems travel across continents: through Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the Scottish Highlands, the Greek islands, and the mountain wildernesses of the American Northwest, seeking meaning in the spaces left behind. These poems embrace the raw physicality of place, uncovering the deep textures of the natural world as both a witness and companion to loss. Amid the perpetual elegy of everything, Pine offers moments of improbable wonder. Johnson's voice is steady and rich with narrative, guiding us through landscapes of memory and wilderness alike. In this intimate collection, grief and grace are intertwined, and the world—against all odds—goes on.

Table of Contents:
Prologue 11In a New Grief Marquette 15Chorus of the Cold Weather Body Farm 17“What’s Your Name, and What City Are You Calling From?” 19I just can’t remember who to send it to 20The Snowplows of My Hometown 22Winter Shore 23Over the Bridge at the Mouth of the Dead 24Maybe I’m Not Grieving Right 25Genesis 26Nagasaki, Marquette 28Hometown for the Summer 29Matins 30Common 31Twenty-Five Miles from Milk 32The Trees of Town 33Two Neighborhood Robins 34Tensile 35The Historic House Painter 36Samu as Cutting Wood a Winter Ahead 38When Something’s Good, Keep It Glenelg and Grace in Distant Ruins 41The Still Voice Ruin 42Return 43The Glen 45Ancestry on Glenelg Bay 46Realism 47Glenelg Wedding Eve 48Among Ancestors’ Wild Summits 49After November, December 50My Brilliant Former Student and Friend Twenty Years Younger than Me and Struggling to Find a Meaningful Job Ended His Life in November 51Defenseless 52Reading Seferis at Sea 53Somewhere on the Ruins of Somewhere Else 54You Travel Awhile 55When I Think of Cathedrals 57Fade 59Wanting It to Count for More 61Sally Mann 62The Last Pregnancy Test 64Art 65In Nazaré for the Waves when Some Friends Are Dying and Others Dead The Farm, the Cabin, High Wildreness West 69Pine 71Route 87Cobweb in Winter 89Hypochondria Coping Strategy with Barn 90Unstacking the Wood 91Whose Name was writ in Water 92Valley of the Present Perfect 93the holiness of the Heart’s affection 94Among Riverbank Cottonwoods 95Amy

About the Author :
Jonathan Johnson is a poet, author, and MFA professor at Eastern Washington University. His poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies, appeared in Best American Poetry, and heard on NPR. His previous works include three books of poetry, Mastodon, 80% Complete, In the Land We Imagined Ourselves, and May Is an Island, as well as two memoirs and a play. He migrates between his hometown of Marquette, Michigan; the coastal Scottish Highlands; and the American Northwest.

Review :
Previous praise for Jonathan Johnson’s poetry: "Jonathan Johnson’s poems bristle with narrative but their great strength lies in their physicality. Reading this book, you find yourself in a world rich in texture, raw with meaning, vastly more immediate and American than the Internet, addressed by a voice you learn to trust." Previous praise for Jonathan Johnson’s poetry: "Johnson’s Mastodon, 80% Complete is fresh, tough, and stimulating, full of 'thinginess,' textural concretia, a specific density that carries the reader along as a participant, whether willing or not. It is fascinating and original work." Previous praise for Jonathan Johnson’s poetry: "Panoramic in sweep and tender in spirit, these poems whirl us across many American landscapes and zoom us into many lives—from Wyatt Earp’s wife’s to that of a grieving son. Johnson is a generous pathologist of the human heart who is careful to leave its mystery intact." Previous praise for Jonathan Johnson’s poetry: "I love the blasting, rock and roll energy in Jonathan Johnson’s poetry. . . . Though it is tinged with sorrow, In the Land We Imagined Ourselves makes me glad of heart—makes me, in Johnson’s better words, 'happy to be hungry in the oh so cinematic air.'” Previous praise for Jonathan Johnson’s poetry: "I prize Jonathan Johnson’s stunning new collection, In the Land We Imagined Ourselves, and I believe in the lives found here."