Shadow Act: An Elegy for American Journalist James Foley
Learn More »
Shadow Act: An Elegy for American Journalist James Foley
“These poems—both stark and loving— are an act of documentary poetics, an archive of a life, and a tribute to a friendship. Daniel Johnson presents us with the facts of James Foley’s life, and the echoes of his death. Foley, in these pages, embraces the shadow, even as he is—always—moving into the light. A question is asked: ‘What do we do with the body?’ And the heartbreaking answer comes: ‘And what do we do, what do we do without?’”
nick flynn / may 2020
“Reading Daniel Johnson’s Shadow Act, I feel like I got to know Jim Foley all over again. His character is both elusive and wonderfully present, if mainly in brief, sharply illuminated bursts. Johnson evokes his eerily resonant smile, always with one eye towards the horizon, in deft, darting language that doesn’t waste a word. Jim’s comings and goings, in and out of often exotic locales, contrast with the intimacy of Johnson’s domestic life, the love within a family that grows steadily and continuously over the course of the book.”
–Clare Morgana Gillis, one of the journalists captured and detained alongside Foley in Libya in 2011
“Death may take away a lot of things but not our words, not our stories, not our memories, and certainly not our desire to shape meaning in the face of all the darkness. The world may deliver terrible things, but it can never outweigh the music of friendship, beauty, insight and courage. These poems are simple in the very way that oxygen is simple … and just as vital. Johnson has done something that James Joyce called on us to do: to recreate life out of life.”
–Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon
“The collection’s breaks and interweavings represent a coming to terms with bereavement. The poet writes beautifully of love tempered by loss, chafing at the inadequacy of language before demonstrating its power to preserve transcendent, humble moments…”
“‘Shadow Act: An Elegy for Journalist James Foley’ is a grieving achievement, a collection of heaving force and tenderness, exploring “absence, presence, & the shining, alchemical ever-presence of absence.”
Nina Maclaughlin, Boston Globe
Purchase Now
How to Catch a Falling Knife
Learn More »
How to Catch a Falling Knife
“To enter the world of Daniel Johnson’s How to Catch a Falling Knife is to enter a playful, celebratory, real, and dangerous place…[Johnson’s] clean, pared down diction recreates real life through the lens of time passed…fearful yet warm, familiar.”
“With slow imagery, fresh syntax, and dry diction, Daniel Johnson crafts a poetry that hunts absence like an animal in the quiet woods.”
“It’s not easy to make interesting poems, yet How to Catch a Falling Knife is full of them…I promise you’ll be surprised and gratified by what you discover.”
“The greatest strength in How to Catch a Falling Knife, Daniel Johnson’s first collection of poems, is its chosen silences. While that may sound like strange praise, this book’s sparseness gives it a paradoxical power where the poet’s ability to know what not to say and when allows what he does say to starkly shine…”
–New Pages
“Fans of poets as disparate as Troy Jollimore, Dean Young and Billy Collins will love Johnson’s How to Catch a Falling Knife—a mournful but wry homage to a childhood in the Rust Belt, to the subtle dangers of family, to overpowering love, to so many things. Johnson’s voice is clear, distinct, and he creates an indelible world that could not have existed without his verse.”
–Dave Eggers
“Daniel Johnson’s collection reads like a contemporary creation myth fanciful and funny and full of strong imagery, poignant surprises, narratives that lodge in the mind at the same time that they zoom us into unexpected, unpredicted places. These poems feel at once deeply introspective and completely at home in the public sphere, shaping and reshaping the sensibility of our times, introducing us to a new poetry, a voice for which we’ve been waiting without knowing it. This is a memorable collection by an important new poet.”
—Laura Kasischke
“How to Catch a Falling Knife is a perfect title for this book: there is danger, playfulness, impossibilities made possible, and surprise, in varying doses, in every poem! Most of all though, what I end up loving most about these spare, intense poems, is their heart, their urgent, nutty, burning, utterly whole heart.”
—Thomas Lux
“Daniel Johnson’s debut book has an inventive exuberance of imagery that is startling and ominous. He gives us a beautifully unpredictable account of the everyday dangers among which body and spirit must move. And he celebrates the everyday, too, with great generosity of spirit and an energetic love of our baffling, irrepressible, unbearable lives.”
—Reginald Gibbons