Press & Reviews:

“Julia Johnson’s poems are intricate and crafty, they explode, treating the reader to a fantastic display that’s part Joseph Cornell, part Yves Klein, part Braque, and that’s just the beginning of the show. In her beautiful new book The Falling Horse she manages to be startling and sweet, breathtaking and heartbreaking at turns, and sometimes all at once. Fresh, commanding, twisty–the book that propels Johnson into the first rank of contemporary American poets. It is not to be missed.” -Frederick Barthelme

“When Julia Johnson writes, ‘Their mouths whisper in an arrangement of calls’, the same might be said of the mouths of these poems. Calls.  Whispers. And I lean in, and don’t know what I hear, but want to hear more.” -Bob Hicok

“To open this book is to enter a dangerous museum, a complex of rooms that serve to alienate while seducing, transfix while extorting. Like a decocted Wallace Stevens, a distilled Samuel Beckett, these small but seamless theatres are portholes into a rebellious, pristine consciousness that speaks to us directly while covertly whittling away all that is familiar. In a mesmerizing whirl of end-stopped anaphora, ‘The Severe Burial of Masks’ is just one of Julia Johnson’s many rhetorical wonders: whispers of creation commingled with destruction: ‘Of thriving…Of the almost shaving of her waist…Of the almost at the altar…Of circling.’ It is her syncopation, her masterful rotation of forces that keeps this poetry alive, and sinister, and amazing.” -Larissa Szporluk

Julia Johnson was born in New Orleans in 1971. Her first book, Naming the Afternoon (Louisiana State University Press, 2002), won the George Garrett New Writing Award for Poetry of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her poems have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Washington Square, Poetry International, Cake Train, New Orleans Review, Third Coast, and other journals and anthologies. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.