Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown by Jill McCabe Johnson

In one of her essays, Audre Lorde brilliantly redefines the erotic as the capacity to fully experience every dimension of life, from the sensual to the political. Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown marvelously illustrates Lorde’s vision. In poems that look at the toughness and tenderness of the body, the joy and dread of consciousness, and the complexities of the intimate and the social, Jill McCabe Johnson continually reaffirms “the lure of thrum, blossom, and burn.” As moving as they are wry and steely, Johnson’s poems are especially urgent in their explorations of the experiences of women in the world, and in their explorations of the psychic violence that pervades much of our daily awareness of contemporary life. Full of vivacity and brokenness, Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown is poetry that we very much need now.

–Rick Barot, author of Chord, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, the UNT Rilke Prize, and the Thom Gunn Award

Jill McCabe Johnson walks through the world aware of both privilege and peril. The pace of her perambulations allows her to exercise (pun fully intended) her keen powers of observation, her formal dexterity, and her considerable lyrical gifts. Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown is full of street smarts, hard-earned wisdom, and an emotional depth that shows us how to face all our revolutions, how to survive with “deliverance and grace.”

–Grace Bauer – author of The Women At The Well and Nowhere All At Once

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]