Ghost River

About the Book

Ghost River invites readers to stare down blue-mouthed crevasses, venture into old growth forests, and peer beneath the floorboards of ancestral homesteads.

In this lyrical and intimate portrait of America's Pacific Northwest, wilderness and home are interwoven. But this is not Arcadia. Deep time is punctured by strip malls and freeways, wildfires and dams. Questioning the influence of the past on the present, the central sequence reimagines this landscape from the perspective of the British explorer, George Vancouver, who charted its waterways on an expedition to locate the illusive Northwest Passage.

In their passage between America and England and the terrain of early motherhood, these poems of loss and renewal explore what it is to be home.Born and raised in America's Washington state, Kris Johnson moved to the UK in 2007. Ghost River is her first book-length collection.

Table of Contents:
11 Bodies of Water 13 Rainier 14 Lake Americana 15 Yellow Jackets 16 Skinny Dip 17 The Desiccation 19 What I meant when I said goodnight 20 The Doe 22 He Is Risen 23 Nisqually Delta Blue 24 Ghost River 27 Blue PASSAGE 35 Theoretical Geographers 36 V is for Vancouver 37 The principled process of deduction 38 Church 39 Vancouver, dreaming 40 Pseudotsuga menziesii 41 Kulshan 42 Rainier 43 Having considered with impartiality the excellencies & deficiencies of the land 44 The burial rituals of the inhabitants 45 In the name of, and for, His Britannic Majesty, His Heirs and successors 46 Your America 47 Passage 48 The death of George Vancouver 49 I dream I am held 50 Indivisible 51 In the Discovery sloop of war 52 George Vancouver, you are not my father 55 Myth 56 We Have Kissed the Four-legged Gods Goodnight 57 Lunar Distances 59 Corona 60 Cottonwood 61 The Time of Lace 62 American Mustard 63 Cast of an Irish Deer 64 None of us is where we ought to be 65 As ash falls on my mother’s garden 66 What you hold 67 Tectonics 68 Tahoma 69 Northwest Passage 71 Gather 72 Notes

About the Author :

Kris Johnson is from America's Washington state but has lived in the UK since 2007. She received her MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University where she has also taught and worked as a researcher. In 2019, she was awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies, including Ambit, Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry London. Her debut pamphlet, Skinny Dip, was published in 2022 by Enchiridion.

Review :
Kris Johnson's Ghost River is a book full of water – from the beautiful and dangerous lakes from the landscape of childhood to the waterways mapped by George Vancouver in the late 1700s. Mapping – of space, place and connection – is abundant in these poems, which explore family history, birth and motherhood with extraordinary and tender precision of language. The natural world rises through Johnson's writing, both in real manifestations and as metaphor, and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest forms the backbone of this collection, which is both wonderful and full of wonder. Kris Johnson offers a mythic sense of the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, fuelled by a complex sense of belonging – and of the feminine dimension of place which lends her work a subtly erotic and immersive quality. The poems encompass both the lyric and the dramatic, and she has an exceptional ear for cadence and timing. While she renews and recalibrates the imaginative world we may glimpse in the work of James Wright, Roethke and Annie Dillard, she is also clearly possessed of an individual vision and song. What most excites me is the unity of thought, feeling and musicality.