Source: Pine State Publicity
Paperback, 104 pgs.
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Metabolics by Jessica E. Johnson explores the changes in humanity and nature and their connection to each other, as well as their disconnect. It is a book-length poem broken down into what I call “different movements.” Opening and closing the collection are poems titled “Herein,” which the narrator speaks to a desire to “exit” their own body but by the end is inhabiting themselves more wholly than before through the experience of becoming a mother.
Exploring life’s processes and the energy it takes to perform them do not remain with just the human body, but with life all around us, including the trees that pay no heed to the children engaging them. “The children told the trees about their favorite shows … The trees said nothing so the children screamed their songs.” (pg. 49)
There is a great deal in this collection that explores our detriment to ecology while still being part of it. What steps we take to reduce what we use, while still allowing children to bring home their trinkets to us as they learn the alphabet, recycling the rest. We even create our own cycles – think of the lists of tasks we create and how we habitually stick to them.
“…Cedar considers all the ways in which she’s not enough, how her hundred feet aren’t tall enough to make a home. Cedar tries coming up with ways of being better, being someone else, being something else, and you — close your leaf pores to the cooler air, host a grand reaction, your body restoring itself from stored up light.” (pg. 19)
There’s rigidity in the cedars that populate the forest as is burns, only for new saplings and life to emerge from the ashes. Cycles upon cycles, interlocked in mysterious ways. But at the heart, Johnson speaks to the adaptability nature has for changes and challenges, and how we need also to be a flexible element in the cycles that are shifting gradually.
Metabolics by Jessica E. Johnson is a ebbing and flowing of cycles and change. Johnson is exploring how we change as we mature and grow, and yet, we still harbor the hurts of the past that shaped us. How can we enable processes to change and adapt to new realities, how can we change our own processes and tasks to create a better, safe world for our children and generations into the future? So many large questions are tackled in this volume, many of which are unanswered but insight deeper thinking.
RATING: Cinquain
Photo Credit: Becca Blevins
About the Poet:
Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry and nonfiction. She’s the author of the book-length poem Metabolics and the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other, and is a contributor to the anthology Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, The Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch. She teaches at Portland Community College and co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series at Tin House.
