Leviathan With a Hook

Kimberly Johnson's dazzling first collection is rooted in the land and language she inherits, then claims for her own. Informed throughout by Milton's "Paradise Lost, " Johnson's poems burst with the flora and fauna of a magnificently imagined landscape, and gain their power from the incomparable language she uses to describe it. This language is itself an organism in her writing, grown from its own seed, its "vowels blooming like necessary globes/with sharp, consonantal edges." Her voice is wholly new and unique; Leviathan with a Hook heralds the arrival of one of the new standard-bearers of American verse.