The burgeoning world

In Sonja Johanson's new collection, the burgeoning world, the natural and human worlds mingle in gorgeous, often unsettling ways. From lush to bare, the landscape she presents us with is so intertwined with and impacted by our actions that we realize the two have always been one. Johanson paints quietly self-assured portraits of what seems, on the surface, outside us. But nothing is truly outside us. "If I stretched out my hand / would it raise a tidal bore / would it empty reservoirs". Imaginative, lucid, haunting, the burgeoning world is a heartfelt reflection on recognizing light as it filters down through "branches, brachia, arms" to splay across our troubled faces, to plant "messages in the soil".

--John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another