The Call Home

by Susan Johnson

Scheduled Release Date: Apr 15, 2023

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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 collections bind 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.

“Susan Johnson’s poems call us home in the best of ways, back to our rightful place in the natural world, back to the simple hopes and joys of life, like planting new carrots/ in the garden, one tiny/ seed at a time. With the wisdom of a sage, she 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