Kimberly Johnson – Stars Shall Bend Their Voices

Kimberly Johnson: All Creatures of Our God and King

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.

Maurice Manning

Dana Gioia

Zeina Hashem Beck

Vijay Seshadri

Margaret Gibson

Robert Hass

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Yehoshua November

Kate Daniels

Kathleen Norris

Edward Hirsch

Kaveh Akbar

Mark Jarman

Sydney Lea

Linda Gregerson

Richard Chess

Jay Hopler

Lorna Goodison

Alicia Ostriker

Shara McCallum

Kwame Dawes

Jacqueline Osherow

Scott Cairns

Kimberly Johnson

Jason Gray

“‘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