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Open Books: Events
May 16, 2010 03:00 PM
JONATHAN JOHNSON & BRETT EUGENE RALPH
Jonathan Johnson’s latest, In the Land We Imagined Ourselves ($15.95 Carnegie Mellon), is a collection of poems buoyant and wistful -- "my restless voice replaced / and your restless voice replaced / by sky darkening to a pure eternity" -- and often concerned with seeking and/or finding place. The place may be vividly imagined, sharply remembered, or literally the place the poem was written. His work is comfortably at home in the Pacific Northwest and Upper Peninsula of Michigan -- "loads of subalpine spruce roll downshifting testimonials / from the furthest edge of elevation. // The wood's lowgrade. But the chainsaws sing."
Brett Eugene Ralph was raised in Southern working-class culture, has been a punk and Southern rock musician, and is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist, influences that fuel his gritty, compassionate, at times surreal poems. Black Sabbatical ($14.95 Sarabande), his first book, features his larger-than-life character -- "I'll hijack / escalators, juggling griefs; / I'll swallow the graveyard, / every purple leaf. And I will eat / the deadly thing and it shall not harm me." The character of these poems is also fully capable of a generous, familial embrace of others -- "I wanted news, / any kind of news. / I wanted to know what was happening // to everyone else."
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