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

AUGURY is Linnea Johnson's second collection of poems. Her first collection, THE CHICAGO HOME, is the first winner of the Alice James Books Beatrice Hawley Award, first published in 1986, then republished in 2007 by Alice James Books (Farmington, Maine). She is also a watercolorist, photographer, and papermaker, essayist, fiction writer, political activist, and sometime performance artist. Her reading of a cycle of poems in play form, Swedish Christmas, is available as a CD. She grew up in Chicago and loves it still. Spring usually finds her on the Platte River in Nebraska among migrating Sandhill Cranes. Most Septembers she breathes with the tides on the rocky coast of Maine. Where she would live actually and not just virtually is at her father's thatched-roof farmhouse on the southwestern coast of Sweden. Right now she lives with chickens, cats, a pup, and a writer/chicken-homesteader on a few acres on the extreme west side of Lawrence, Kansas, where a coyote naps in the meadow, bluebirds nest outside her writing room window, and tornadoes swirl by every now and then. Linnea Johnson holds a BA and a Ph.D. in English and an MA in Writing and Women's Studies and has taught in colleges and universities. She founded Red Stuga Studio and Espelunda 3 Productions, a Writing and Creativity Mentoring Consultancy offering private mentoring and classes in creativity, poetry, prose, and playwriting along with play, CD, and staged reading productions.