Kimberly Johnson – Stars Shall Bend Their Voices

KJohnson2 Kimberly Johnson
It’s not the repeated alleluia. It’s not the catalogue of earthy beauty. It’s not the open-throated Ptolemaic chime. What undoes me is the single minor chord.

Contributors

Maurice Manning

Margaret Gibson

Kaveh Akbar

Vijay Seshadri

Jacqueline Osherow

Kathleen Norris

Kate Daniels

Robert Hass

Linda Gregerson

Zeina Hashem Beck

Scott Cairns

Jason Gray

Shara McCallum

Kimberly Johnson

Jay Hopler

Alicia Ostriker

Edward Hirsch

Yehoshua November

Lorna Goodison

Mark Jarman

Sydney Lea

Kwame Dawes

Dana Gioia

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Richard Chess

Advance Praise for Stars Shall Bend Their Voices

“‘I like to sing,’ begins Alicia Ostriker in her essay that joins so many necessary voices of contemporary poetry. Each piece collected in this book allows for memoir, prayer, and rebellion in its examination of what hymns have and can mean to the culture, to the heart. In these pages, the writers you’d think of as most interested in skepticism lay bare their politics and their personal history in order to better know their relationship to faith.”
—Jericho Brown, author of The New Testament

“From Zeina Hashem Beck’s memories of hearing prayers from Tripoli’s mosques to Linda Gregerson’s most beloved Christmas hymn, these essays reveal contemporary poets’ connections to spiritual songs: the lyric impulse, the importance of breath, the pull of anaphora and rhyme. Stars Shall Bend Their Voices is an illuminating—and luminous—collection.”
—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

Poets craft words to affect us; hymns sing words into our bodies. How wonderful, then, to read skilled poets speaking personally about hymns and spiritual songs they know. I love this wonderful compendium of poets who have taken hymns to heart—insightful, moving, and revelatory. -Donald Saliers, author of Music and Theology.

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Kimberly Johnson: All Creatures of Our God and King