Augury

Conjured from hen scratches and devil's tales, from family stories and ancestral songs, Linnea Johnson's poems migrate from a landscape of elegy to roost in the cliffs of lyric transformation. In musical lines that narrate both the natural history of birds and their folklore, as well as her family history of Swedish immigration to the Midwest, Johnson explores the darkness that leads to light. "'It is flesh which remembers, bones which are/remembered....' Who would not believe her?"—Catherine Anderson