Hags on Tractors

by Penny Johnson

In these memoir-textured poems, Penny Johnson puts us in the driver’s seat—of a tractor that is— and shows us what it means to be a mature, rural woman grappling with the land and its seasonal weather changes, as well as the unique challenge of leading this life amidst a male-dominated field.

Enjoy a video of Penny reading from Hags on Tractors:

Early Praise for Hags on Tractors:

In Hags on Tractors, Penny Johnson’s poems enter the land and finger the coloring change of beige mushroom, vermillion tomatoes, evergreen rosemary, fat-thumbed blackberries, magenta holly hocks in her deeply porous study under the unforgiving sky. And look, the blue-veined kale sprouting into its own life, cycles free-faced from dirt. So it is: Johnson sprouts into her own life, wrangles more free, wrangles men and their useful love of tractors, shared or not, as earth-bound becomes earth-moving glory. The memory wounds of father-mother curd slip past an unhinged pasture gate, propped open or shut, and voices release, Who do you think you are? Safety is not lost or found but falls into the earth where Johnson stands her ground with pale wolf dogs and alabaster-hooved black mare close by. Look, she says again, at the wonder grown past haunting, Tonight, I brew this soup of vermillion tomatoes plucked out of frost, whose cracks are barely sealed over with opaque filament. This glue. The sealing of her heart without regret, she crescendos the Howl/ in polished moon. She ingests this place, As if land can hold still all it burns, buries and brings alive. Johnson’s poems direct us: Try./ Hold the sky. And thereby announces our disappearing into the ground.

—Beatrix Gates, author of The Burning Key: New & Selected Poems (1973-2023)

It’s difficult to say what is most intriguing about Penny Johnson’s poems here. Maybe it’s the fresh language that enthralls us with its sounds. Maybe it’s the vivid and startling images that leap off the page. Maybe it’s the way Johnson thumbs her nose at tradition, engaging us through a structure which floats and spins and turns in on itself. Whatever it is, her poems bring the rural scene to life with all its sights, smells, sounds, tastes and challenges. Memory plays a role here, too, and Johnson leads us deftly back and forth between the now and the then. These are poems to be tasted, smelled and read over and over again.

—Susan Blair, author of A Howling and What Remains of a Life, and editor of The Shrub-Steppe Poetry Journal

The power of these poems is due to the simple fact that Johnson has invented a language using English words that resembles to great effect the nature of trauma, disassociation, sexuality, cars, boys, horses.

—Michael Kline, author of When I Was a Twin

About the Author

Penny Johnson lives at the base of a mountain with a horde of animals in Central Washington. She and her horse run the farm. Johnson provides glimpses of extraordinary lives that have lost some scaffolding but radiate genuine and quixotic vulnerability. Johnson’s writing is visual and tactile. She has been featured poet in literary reviews and a contender in Seattle Poetry Slams.  Johnson was the recipient of the Kirkwood Award for Short Fiction through UCLA Extension. She was a resident of Devereux, received her BA from The Evergreen State College, MFA from Goddard College. Both Johnson’s novels, Memories of a Female Truck Driver and Double Back, are available from Amazon. She is a contributor in the WA129 anthology with poems previously published in Bellowing Ark, Pawn to Infinity, Spectacles, City Primevil, and Spillway. Johnson has most recently been published in Yakima Coffee House Poets where she won the Tom Pier Prize, Shrub-Steppe Review, and Cirque, A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim, with a Pushcart Prize nomination, Cleaver Fall 2023, Honorable Mention judged by Diane Suess and Quartet Journal.

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