The Call Home

Finalist of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2022



The Call Home invites the reader to accompany the poet in natural world settings-lying alongside a caterpillar outside her childhood home on a military base in North Carolina, listening for the silence of salty tides of the Rappahannock River at her parents' final home in Virginia, discovering salmon nests in the Cle Elum River near her home in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Grounded in these settings, this collection binds five generations of women, revealing an undeniable rhythm of love and suffering, a persistent pulse as they share and bear witness to patterns of beauty, connection, tragedy, loss, and continuity. These poems resonate with the tender relationships among members of all communities, all listening for the call home.



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"With the wisdom of a sage, Susan Johnson crafts poems that showcase the saving grace of small moments, how they can redeem even our darkest hours, teaching us that an unguarded heart/ is the only way."

-James Crews, author of Kindness Will Save the World: Stories of Compassion & Connection



 

"Accessible and engaging, Johnson's book is a finely crafted antidote to the world right now."

 -Susan Blair, author of What Remains of a Life

 



"...a tapestry of words bespeaking pain, love and much, much wisdom."

 -Ed Stover, President, The Yakima Coffeehouse Poets

 



"These poems are intimate, raw, moving, and in moments, willfully hopeful. Rich in feeling, profound in insight, these are poems you will remember long after closing the book."

-Terry Martin, author of The Light You Find