photo: Becca Blevins

Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry, nonfiction, and things in between. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Harvard Review, Entropy, River Teeth, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Interim, The Account, and Tin House, among others. She is an Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient and an Oregon Book Award Finalist for her chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press). Her first full-length collection, Metabolics, is forthcoming from Acre Books in 2023. She lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at Portland Community College.

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Advance praise for metabolics, ​forthcoming in 2023 from acre books. ​

​"These poems do just what we hope poems will do: they wake us up to our lives. Clear-eyed, they trace in loving micro-attention how the day happens in our bodies, our minds, our devices, our plastics, our politics, our dreams. They are about mothering, and they are about mothering attentiveness. Through such care, language transforms into 'CO2 wafting into an open leaf pore,' and we breathe again." -Eleni Sikelianos, author of Make Yourself Happy, The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Body Clock, and The California Poem 

“Johnson metabolizes the strange rituals of daily life into poetic language. With a ʻvast, provisional body,’ she moves between the home and the world, touching and consuming the real (plastic, cats, trees, devices) and the virtual (the internet, social networks, texts) in entangled ʻcycles within cycles.’ Once you enter this book, it too will consume your attention. It will eat your imagination until you become ʻsomething more than you imagined.’”  -Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold,  from unicorporated territory [lukao], from unicorporated territory [guma], from unicorporated territory [saina], and from unicorporated territory [hacha] 

"'Herein to hold my dailiness I have borrowed the language of certainty.' Jessica Johnson’s Metabolics transports the reader into a twining, double helix of “job and sweat and screen time and so many kinds of holding,” entangling threads of motherhood, organic growth and decay, digital overload, anthropogenic awareness, and the body’s own softening with keen critique and powerful bafflement. Like mycorrhizal fungi, each strand and each poem feeds every other, creating a stronger, larger, more mysterious whole.  Johnson’s voice is both detached and interior, plainspoken and strange-syntaxed; at times I was reminded of Eavan Boland’s attention to the domestic, at times of CD Wright’s haunting journeys through scientific/historic fact. In the end, though, Metabolics is utterly its own unique experience, one that will leave the reader inspired to re-examine and re-engage the deep strangeness of our daily lives.  I am so grateful to have read this book." - Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and Theorem

“Capturing the ephemeral ways in which one is strange to oneself—the edges of self, of forests, of spaces, of existence entangled with the limitation of the shapes of things, this book, full of multi-species encounters, enacts the discontinuous and porous nature of selfhood and of being more than what can be contained within the confines of a body. With a keen perception and a lyricism that penetrates like light, Metabolics is a collection that will possess you.”  Janice Lee, author of Imagine a Death and Separation Anxiety

"Jessica Johnson’s Metabolics is a song for our times where “the car consumes refined bones” and the speaker’s “energy is taken up … by the emotional exoskeleton of text threads with their fibrous connection to all your feelings.” Metabolics pinpoints the environmental conditions of late capitalism where the “wonderland sky” is threatened by “the understory tinder quick to catch,” and “the trees said nothing so the children screamed their songs.” What does it mean to mother now? To teach? To live in a body at the edge of a forest that is ready to burn? Each prose poem in Jessica Johnson’s Metabolics is a window into these questions, and yet each poem captures much more than a moment in time. Johnson’s poetics requires us to confront our troubled present, regard the 'chemical conspiracy between trees…bodies listening to bodies. What a marvelous book.'"  - Tyler Mills, author of Hawk Parable, City Scattered, and Tongue Lyre

Praise for In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (2014), winner of the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press chapbook competition and Oregon Book Award finalist

For a moment, reader, as you orient yourself in one of Jessica Johnson’s poems, you might classify a scene as quiet and scientific, or moody, wet, and metrical; then a shift and, god, it’s luminous and grief-struck and haunting and it’s yours.  The linked poems in the book’s first section are a feat of beauty: the settings for this memory of transformation and lost innocence are a greenhouse, DNA lab, fish hatchery, swimming pool, and slant house, each mysterious and glimmering. The second section of ocean dwellers, anatomies, and sea-soaked lyrics is equally remarkable. Jessica Johnson is a true discovery.  -Kathleen Flenniken

"[In Absolutes We Seek Each Other] excels at exploring the tension between simple existence and imagination." - Poetry Northwest
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“Johnson’s poems are acts of kinship-in-strangeness with the natural world.  Even the slightest creatures are alive with vision." - Joanna Klink