People Say Nice Things About Me

Praise for Gods in the Wilderness (poetry collection, 2016)

"With Gods in the Wilderness, Caitlin Johnson casts a white-hot eye on her world and its wounds--and her own. These poems blaze and flash with images of cutting, tearing, reassembly, reinvention; savage, fiery resurrection. This collection is a battle cry--the fight to survive ultimately stronger than the undertow of tragedy. Johnson carves these poems with a savage obsidian blade. Tear into her words ferociously; 'see what steel bleeds from her.'"

- Nancy Henry 

Praise for Boomerang Girl (poetry chapbook, 2015)

"These poems are marvelous and ambitious and wicked and each poem--with its distinct images, tropes and musicality become a thread in this tapestry of words. Twenty-four poems unspun from the deeply familiar and woven anew into a chapbook that winds back through time. They shimmer with truth, shed timeworn mythologies to form a radiantly transformed landscape. From the first poem 'Defenestration' 'readying this girl for the loss // of her beauty & power' through the last poem these poems, every one of them, are alive within the whole."

- Laura LeHew

Praise for Miles (mixed-genre chapbook, 2008)
"Caitlin Johnson's poems are terrific. Aside from such obvious winners as 'Eureka!,' 'Proof that the Earth Is Moving,' 'Zen,' and 'Novel," her sequence of 'Postcards' is wonderfully innovative. I've never read anything quite like her three sections of 'Postcards'; they are certainly not predictable travel scenes! Plus, her fiction is good. 'Isobel' is a piece of sudden fiction that recounts the story of a suicide with the elliptical power of a writer like Stuart O'Nan and the drop-dead emotional intensity of someone like David Foster Wallace (in some of his short fiction)--or else, to cite a woman, Joyce Carol Oates."

- James Reiss

"Miles is that rare creation--a lyrical vision that is completely new and unfettered by traditional expectations of form or even intent. Johnson's world is one all of us will recognize, but her view of it and her method of expression are at once both unique and oddly familiar--an experience similar to that of hearing a melody for the first that you know--impossibly--you've always known."

- John Williamson

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