Born Again

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Women's Studies. Art. Performance Studies. Religion & Spirituality. "BORN AGAIN is an ecstatic disquisition on the psychic, sensual and cerebral power of religious experience. In a crucible of direct encounter with the Holy Spirit, towering and oppressive mental structures are deranged and reshaped into a dynamic feminist recourse of audacious openings: borderless, raw and alive. Instead of shaming the male god figurehead these lyrics twist in vertiginous funnels disarming power empathically, a rebellious performance that proliferates like quicksilver in a revelatory field of creative fire. Libidinal improvisatory anti-edict, anti-threshold terrestrial tangibility. Expressing volatile, febrile and point blank composure Ivy Johnson redefines (fathoms) what it means to be enthralled as she unburdens the epic weight of judgment and spiritual peril in a veil of viscose corporeality. The erotics of immanence are emancipatory and miraculous here, now."--Brenda Iijima




"BORN AGAIN is a book about the redemptive power of the singular voice, arising from the mixture of a multitude of voices, coming together as a single flame to light the way through a landscape of sorrow, evil, extreme beauty, and extreme feeling. The book teeters between definitions of poetry and the essay form to come upon the right way to say the unsayable, telling us things like: 'I am nothing like a tree / You think I'm in a drought / You think I'm shriveling up / You are wrong.' Ivy Johnson is a poet who believes that the I and the spirit are intertwined forever in the act of the poem. She gives the poets of today and tomorrow the permission to gain strength from the force of the persona, with its ability to surround trauma and alchemize it into the sort of language that sustains. Johnson tells us: 'I am free I am free /
Believe me I am.' And we do believe she is free. And we believe, in her poems, we are, too."--Dorothea Lasky




"Are you 'more Medea than Oedipus'? Are you Jesus? Have you arrived to Ivy Johnson's poetry to experience the revisitation of rape or an abstract 'ecological armageddon' of language or the orifice of a poetic body? Here, we become her wakeful marigolds. We sit across from her like pages of membranes, trying to eat as fast as we can off the hypnotic fluency of her literary fingers, twisting and turning with her as we unlock the 'locomotion of a tautology,' the constant lips and thighs and gurgles or shareholders of her text. And we don't die happily."--Vi Khi Nao

Ivy Johnson is a poet and performance artist in Oakland, CA. Her book, AS THEY FALL, is a collection of 110 notecards for aleatoric ritual and was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2013 and BORN AGAIN was published by The Operating System in 2018. She is co-founder of The Third Thing, an ecstatic feminist performance art duo. They have a self-titled chapbook out with Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs.