How to Catch a Falling Knife (Paperback)

""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

Like an album of photographic negatives, this book is transformed by light, inhabited by family, illness, mortality, and faith. Daniel Johnson hammers plain speech into exquisite song that is celebratory, mysterious, and elegiac. This transfixing collection resounds with what's left unsaid.

From "Hungry for Wonder":

"Smoke smeared the sky."
"the sun was a hole, "
"but my mother wouldn't believe"

"the river was burning."
"Another drowned twin, "
"a two-headed perch: perhaps, "

"but water, brown and crooked"
"as it was, still wouldn't burn."
"Must be a mill caught fire, my mother said. "

Daniel Johnson's poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including "The Best American Poetry 2007," "The Iowa Review," "American Letters & Commentary," and "I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio." Johnson is the founding director of 826 Boston and teaches writing in public schools, hospitals, and prisons. He lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.