The Wind Speaks
Poems
Winner of the 2020 Hopper Poetry Prize What would you get if a Taoist monk sat down with Wendell Berry, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sappho, and G.M. Hopkins to write sonnets that banish conventions of form, structure, & meter, while creating new parameters within which to start, stop, surge, yield, twist, turn, open, close. These poems beg to be spoken aloud; each finds a singular cadence, tension, perspective, to bring to the natural world fresh and sometimes unusual voices (a poem in the voice of a praying mantis? …vulture? …whippoorwill?) Bit by bit, they work from the observed and/or fantasized, to get to the internal, the personal, to a celebratory grief.
Elsa Johnson has spent most of her life living among and appreciating the green verdant hills and valleys, ledges, streams, and bogs of northeastern Ohio (last of the Appalachian foothills—a place that unequivocally wants to be a forest). She is a poet, writer, landscape designer, artist, and hands-on environmental sustainability advocate, invasive species warrior, and a passionate volunteer in nearby Forest Hill Park. She lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio and writes for and co-edits Gardenopolis Cleveland, a blog about everything green in Cleveland.
