Jessica E. Johnson

A memoir of Johnson's unusual upbringing during the 1970s and '80s, interwoven with the story of her transition to parenthood in post-recession Portland, Oregon. In the weeks after her first child is born, Jessica E. Johnson receives an email from her mother that contains artifacts of the author's early childhood: scans of Polaroids and letters her mother wrote in mountain...

In this debut poetry collection, a single speaker tries to control her body and negotiate her time with digital devices, all the while navigating identities, impulses, and relationships that are often in tension. Metabolics, a book-length poem, borrows the movements of metabolic pathways to consider how nature accomplishes both balance and deep transformation. In visual figures and prose blocks that...