Praise

Praise for Midlife Abecedarian:

With deep, unapologetic attention to the revelations of midlife, Melissa Fite Johnson’s Midlife Abecedarian reads as devotional to the miraculous present and as fearless, honest reckoning with the past. What does it mean to find peace, to be grounded in our own right at the midpoint of our lives, even as “God is a glass / drying on the counter,” even as “the wind insists” and “every blade of grass bristles”? Who are we as women if we do not choose to be mothers? Who are we as women if we choose to love ourselves and to be loved? Midlife Abecedarian accounts for what remains unresolved in our histories, but it also insists that we acknowledge the sacred and ordinary moments of daily life as they unfold. In this striking collection, Johnson acclaims the power of forging one’s own path, in a world which tries relentlessly to define us.
—Joan Kwon Glass, author of Night Swim

Midlife Abecedarian is a book of conversations—with other poets, with pop culture, with family members and friends, with a younger self. If you are a member of “Generation Catalano,” to whom the book is dedicated, you will see yourself in this book, especially in the moments that wrestle with the fantasies sold to us in the 1990s and how they warped our sense of self and desire (“though what did I ever see in Jordan? Obviously / Rickie Vasquez the real treasure here”). In this book, the past is often a source of grief and confusion, while the present offers respite and clarity. Johnson writes with candor, navigating the terrain of middle-aged womanhood with wit and compassion. Johnson portrays the joys of middle age, even when they look different from what we imagine when we’re young: “We can forget, / X-ing off to-do lists, / yawning, but this is the / zenith of our lives. Yes, this.”

This collection revels in formal skill and inventiveness, filled with sonnets, villanelles, pantoums, and of course abecedarians as well as free verse and prose poems. These poems invite the reader to engage not only with the contemporary but also with American literary tradition, particularly represented by Whitman, who appears in several poems as a kind of ornery muse. In response to Whitman’s cosmic perspective, Melissa Fite Johnson asks us to pay attention to the inescapable, ineffable texture of the now: “I am trying to write the present. / A quiet night, a photo of a moment // I wouldn’t think to photograph. Isn’t this / the origin of all poems? The blink, the breath.”
—Laura Passin, Borrowing Your Body

In Midlife Abecedarian, Johnson “miracles” the ordinary, claiming “no one wants to hear that shit” and then “writing the opposite.” She states, “I was beginning,” as she is, and as we all are, every day, beginning anew. These poems insist on vulnerability, on NOT pretending, as they urge the reader to believe that “there are many paths to happiness.” The speaker is inviting—part 90’s teen, part woman, part teacher, part poet. This book is one of those paths. These poems are a balm, offering, “This is why / we’re here—to live and to die, for someone to care.” Isn’t that the point of poetry? To find magic in the ordinary? She admits that loving her life might not be a popular opinion, but it is. We should all be so lucky. Let these poems inspire love, attention and overall, care.
—Leah Umansky, Of Tyrant

For Green:

The poems of Melissa Fite Johnson’s Green excavate the bittersweet tenderness invoked by the collection’s title. To be green is to be naïve, heading into a sea of defining experiences, a vantage Johnson wonderfully explores in poems that chart the pains of girlhood: the casual critiques that stick, the difficulty of relationships with boys, family, friends. She also writes movingly of her disabled father. Grappling with the grief and guilt evoked by his death, Johnson admits, “If a poem resurrects, how many times have I tried?” While some losses cannot be reversed, it is in this act of writing that Johnson offers readers another vision of green: to grow through challenge, to will oneself to flourish despite pain, is to be fully alive, a trajectory Green reminds is possible for us all.
—Ruth Williams, Flatlands

In Melissa Fite Johnson’s beautiful new book, Green, a body and a heart are both things that can be divided. Johnson looks at the way grief has its own language and how a mouth is a thing that can both create and erase. In these poems, the past has crystallized into desire lessons, the fear that accompanies those first encounters, and the inherited legacies that shape how we see ourselves. This book knows time slips away quickly but holds us in unflinching memory before releasing us to the wide and green world.”
—Traci Brimhall, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

In her latest poetry collection, Melissa Fite Johnson somehow manages to lace grief with hope, and questioning with reckoning. Love is at the heart of this collection, but not simple love: love that questions, love that demands, love that is irreverent and taxing, love in its fragility and strength. The poems dig through the rubble of youth and uncover hard truths, and the poems show how when we are young, we may think something horrible will swallow the rest of our lives, and then it doesn’t, and how this is terrible and beautiful all at once. This poet writes of the connection we have as humans to each other, even when the string that ties us is so thin it can barely be found; yet she finds it, and she plucks.
—Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning

The poems in Green, both searing and soft-hearted, span from early childhood to old age, and demonstrate with consistent poignancy that girlhood and womanhood are not separate phases of life but as interconnected as fibers in a leaf. Through the unique lens of the color green and all its complicated connotations—newness, nature, jealousy, and more—Johnson unflinchingly examines the many shades of human relationships, asking ‘What if?’ before ‘time rusts the gate closed.’ These touching, impeccably crafted poems dare to heal the emotional wounds that come from living and loving in a gendered world.
—Marianne Kunkel, Hillary, Made Up

For A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky:

A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky is shot through with loss, with the ways our bodies fail us, and with what we can’t—or don’t—say. The speakers are daughters, wives, not-mothers, and they occupy domestic spaces in which “nothing is missing.” Indeed, everything is present in Melissa Fite Johnson’s elegiac collection, even the empty spaces: a remembered father, the children not to be born, the past that is at once long-gone and not gone at all.
—Maggie Smith, Good Bones 

Melissa Fite Johnson’s A Crooked Door Cut Into the Sky is like a poetry photo album where poems appear like perfect snapshots of a life being lived. Johnson’s poems question what it means to be human—what we hold onto and what we let go. The narrative beauty of these poems lead us into a garden where branches quilt patterns into the sky—the possibility of becoming a parent and the experience of losing one. This chapbook grounds us in the past and present and connects the two worlds—leaving me thankful for this poet who opens the door for us to walk into her poems and join her.
—Kelli Russell Agodon, Hourglass Museum 

For While the Kettle’s On:

While the Kettle’s On openly, whimsically and originally explores homecoming, whirling its journey through past generations, the present body, making home, unmaking the self, and everyday love. This strong first collection lands on what is, and what is behind what is, from the tree in the present that will one day be gone, to the grandmother once young, choosing “this future, this little life.” Melissa Fite Johnson helps us see the large world encapsulated in the gestures and glances of even the smallest moments of this little or big life, including what losses damage even fresh air and what graces give us back all we are. In essence, the whole collection is about love, and how to recognize it when it shines through the moments that matter.
—Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate

Melissa’s poems are at turns delightfully romantic (think Nora Ephron, think Say Anything) and mournfully elegiac, never letting us forget, even in the domestic bliss of the evening walk, that we are as mortal and frail as the trees and flowers around us.
—Laura Lee Washburn, This Good Warm Place 

Reading While the Kettle’s On, one feels invited into Melissa Fite Johnson’s family. Like a good novel, Johnson’s poems bring us into her world, and readers come to know her the way we know a close relative or good friend: sharing times of joy and loss, sharing life-changing events (deaths, romance, and marriage) and the small day-to-day details (a garden of hydrangeas or eating hot dogs at a baseball game) that make our lives most truly our own. Each poem is well-crafted and enjoyable on its own, but the true pleasure is in the way the book as a whole draws us vividly into a community of family and friends and, most of all, into the mind of a poet who reveals a full range of human emotion, from happiness to sorrow and from nagging self-doubt to quiet confidence.
—Christopher Todd Anderson, former Poetry Editor for The Midwest Quarterly

I have been reading Melissa’s poetry—one poem every other Sunday—for more than a decade now, with pleasure, and with admiration for her dedication, artistry, and skill. I suspect she is her own toughest critic, and that is how it should be. She’s good: her word choices are good, her lines lean, no lardy modifiers. She’s a poet. I’m glad to have her as a friend.
—Roland Sodowsky, AWP Award Winner Things We Lose