Molly Johnsen’s debut poetry collection, Everything Alive, published on October 14th by Green Writers Press, opens with an awakening. The first poem, “After the Accident,” ushers us into the bright, sterile room we’ll come to associate with Johnsen’s fraught subjection to pain and the care of other people: “I wake / in the hospital bed, my body / torn, my clothing . . .” The disjunctive, ragged breaks assemble from glimpse and fragment an experience other poems will slowly fill in as Johnsen recounts and comprehends her emergent reality: the recovery from a traumatic car accident that took place in 2015. In Everything Alive, Johnsen, working mainly from autobiography, is a poet of brief, precise scenes; direct address and apostrophe; and frank renderings of human interdependence.
One of the book’s most pressing tensions is there from the start: a candid, conversational voice, like that of a close friend, reckoning with a life-altering, estranging experience. I was often arrested by Johnsen’s opening lines; they actively complicate her easy manner by harnessing a violent force to upend the common and roughen the familiar. With the collection’s second poem, “My Body is Full of Things That Aren’t Mine,” Johnsen begins,
When I opened my eyes, I knew
hands had been inside me.
Between my legs up into my
pelvis and under my ribs. Bones
split like shards of black sky in
lightning.
The speaker surfaces to a disturbing revelation, one that admits to a loss of agency so profound it externalizes even the body’s interior; at the same time, the poem makes a claim for the body’s knowledge as a lyrical knowledge, one that works sensorially and subconsciously. This knowledge becomes a framework for how the collection makes meaning. The poems condense into sensory experience: lungs are “wrung tight,” the brain is “circuit-mazed” and “neon in patterns.”
Narrative, the linear and the ordered, is provided after, not by Johnsen but by “the Nation’s-Best” whose profession it is to “tidy / the mess.” Johnsen is funny, too, as she catalogues the procedures she underwent: “My ribcage was re / -secured around my still-beating / heart. My skin was stitched.” In her recovery, she describes how the medical staff and their tools have most of the agency: “a tube still pushed itself down my throat”; other times, Johnsen writes with pithy defiance: “I won’t talk about pain. Won’t let him / near my face.” In these constructions, Johnsen wrests back her body, made object by operation, and finds herself firmly in it again.
When Johnsen addresses the accident and its immediate aftermath, as in “Undone” and “When Asked if I saw the White Light,” details arrive in bright objects and brief impressions, in clipped lines that dismiss the rules of proper syntax: “I recalled the firetruck, / scissors cutting / shirt from body”; “Yellow liquid in the bag beside me. / Cellophaned sandwich on a pink plastic tray”; “my neon sneaker in the street.” I was taken by how vividly objects materialize, though Johnsen doesn’t provide the how and why: shorn from her lines are the verbs that assign causality, the persons who act. As these poems recur and worry over the accident, grasping at it, turning it, the reader gains entry to the experience through collage and assemblage. The poems are chock-full of the thinginess of Johnsen’s life: apple juice and Jell-O, a tape of Bambi, candle wax, five-egg frittata. Through accumulation, the sensory gives way to perception. Though never oblique, Johnsen refuses to grant her readers a simple chronology; the poems never capitulate to a neat story, trimly packaged for easy consumption.
Instead, the book roves through time across its five sections, using family and childhood as prisms through which to contend with the accident. The role of mother and daughter, caregiver and life-giver, are blurred. The body’s knowledge can allow more realities than the mind’s: “My heart was / made in the dark of my mother” and “I know to reach / for my mother as if / she’s just been born / from my womb.” Delineations of mother/daughter and inside/outside can’t hold under certain pressures, and Johnsen’s fierce honesty keeps her from balking where other writers might. She looks hard at her own fears and desires; she names them without judgement: “I want rock to stay rock, and bone to stay bone”; she declares without hesitation, “I wanted them so badly.”
None of the relationships in Everything Alive are tidy, but for Johnsen, love and family hold fast to the future tense. If these themes dominate the collection’s deep past and shifting present, they also exist in the imagination, which is a belief, though not one that occludes fear, in what’s to come. Much of the poems’ honesty arises in Johnsen’s treatment of the future. There’s no time in this book purged of pain; this is the contract of living: to be “manhandled / by mortality.” In the penultimate poem, Johnsen wryly questions how “We call it Beautiful,” gently taking “life” down a peg, assigning it the diminutive “i,” and claiming to think, instead, of death: “How it will happen to me, / or how it cannot happen to you.” But the last poem rebuffs this finitude in favor of agency, the will of the future tense: “I’ll give birth / to my son, and I’ll never stop holding him.”
Though rooted in Johnsen’s subjectivity, these poems are so attendant to other people. If language can reach toward a future, it also reaches across the present—the body’s knowledge, for all it has to offer, needs to find another person. In Everything Alive, language-acts become acts of forgiveness and grace; poems are sites for realities that never were. Johnsen grants her family clemency through language, writing in “For My Father,”
If I’d known how you hurt
when you stand, I would’ve told you
to sit and lowered the rest
of the earth to the floor.
These poems slowly grind down the myth of self-sufficiency and find a faith in interrelation. To speak, then, to write, is to move us closer to a world in which we are less afraid to ask for one another. Early on, Johnsen states, “Half the blood in my body / comes from other people.” Initially, these lines read as a worrying break between Johnsen’s body and her sense of personhood, but by the collection’s close the declaration becomes a recognition. To live is not merely a matter of being surrounded by the living but an acknowledgement that we are alive because of the living. This recognition isn’t easily won; a person must have agency to find beauty in mutual-reliance and care.
Chatty and conversational or quietly pleading, the poems in Everything Alive don’t push the boundaries of the lyric tradition as much as discover in it the relief of letting the internal meet the external. Johnsen pressurizes the quotidian through her spare language. It’s a pressure that makes me want to return to the origins of words, to question this common stuff we use so often without thinking: how do words assemble into visions, carve new possibilities? How do they reach across the present to touch those around us whom we love and care for? What does it mean to wake? to emerge? What does it mean, for any of us, to live?
