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

Sydney Lea

Mark Jarman

Shara McCallum

Jay Hopler

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Jacqueline Osherow

Kwame Dawes

Zeina Hashem Beck

Margaret Gibson

Alicia Ostriker

Scott Cairns

Vijay Seshadri

Kimberly Johnson

Dana Gioia

Yehoshua November

Robert Hass

Kathleen Norris

Jason Gray

Edward Hirsch

Maurice Manning

Lorna Goodison

Linda Gregerson

Richard Chess

Kate Daniels

Kaveh Akbar

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