An Imperfect Roundness

What a fresh, original voice! Melody Newey Johnson's poems look

inward and outward at the same time and therefore sing with

insights about her journey through the canyons, fields, and

mountains of a well-lived, thoughtful life. Her metaphors illustrate

this simultaneity: her belly is "a moon full of baby"; she trusts the

sky's "billion years of blue." Poems as tight and spare as Emily

Dickinson's offer the same kind of depth: beneath each carefully cut,

honed surface lie extraordinary thought, faith, and imagination for

readers to follow.

--Susan Howe, Author of Stone Spirit and Salt, and an AML Award-winner in poetry