"I'm an emergency," announces a poem in Molly Johnsen's smart, chilling, and tender collection Everything Alive. These poems invite us into hospitals and tunnels, into school rooms and domestic spaces, exploring trauma, time, and the often fragile links between body and self. Johnsen's writing is wrenching, clever, and dryly wise, investigating which wounds can be healed and which will endure, in a world where "it's just hard to figure out what's dead and why." —Natalie Shapero, author of Stay Dead
“Molly Johnsen has accomplished what I feel is a fairly rare and difficult thing: to write a really, really good book of poems. Clear-sighted and moving, the poems that comprise Everything Alive arrive at discoveries and insights that are often startling, surprising, and honest: they bear the thorn of something seen with clarity and rendered honestly—of truth. The book to me is about, in part, our fundamental aloneness. And in poems that acknowledge that fact but embody a constant reaching toward the world and other people, they help us feel less alone.”
—Grady Chambers, author of North American Stadiums and Great Disasters
“Both ode and elegy, Molly Johnsen's Everything Alive is one of the most moving, bittersweet portraits of living I've read in a long time. An expansive epistolary mode and direct address turn these poems toward "everything alive" in the speaker's world: family, beloveds, even the epilepsy that resurfaces after a traumatic accident. Every letter is a love letter, and this book regards our precarious world head-on with fierce, rigorous love. Look here, the details in these poems insist on singing: there's life yet. I love this book.” —Margaret Ray, author of Good Grief, the Ground
“The body’s fragility, and its surprising strength, are at the core of Molly Johnsen’s Everything Alive. Johnsen’s clear-eyed perspective on life and death manifests in her speaker’s willingness to be vulnerable. As she states in “Love, Me,” ‘[c]urve a C around me./Come here. Like this./Make of us a nest, Love./Show me my body’s not/empty,’ Johnsen is unafraid to ask for what she needs to sustain her. Relationships, filial and romantic, tentative and enduring, are at the core of this brave book whose poems run the gamut of what is required to endure. Trauma may be the catalyst for much of what exists in these pages, but resilience and hope are what resonate.” —Christopher Kennedy, author of Clues from the Animal Kingdom