Feeding the Animals

"Jodi Johnson writes like an Angel in love with the world. She knows the risk of being alive and alert, and makes every encounter a perilous discovery. For Johnson a horseback ride is an interior journey illuminated by the stunning accuracy of her vision."

—Benjamin Saltman

"Feeding the Animals is a first book of poems filled with surprising graceful turns. The landscape of the poems teem with animals-birds horses-real creatures who are also figures in a personal mythology emboldened by the author’s passion, recorded with a keen observer’s eye. This felicitous combination of passion and accuracy yields, in poem after poem, an arresting new voice."

—Carol Muske

"I love the thing-richness of these poems: a chalk horse’s white spine, a red beet-stem, a mattress cover swimming with mermaids. In poems as elegant as dressage, as intuitive as a bareback ride, Jodi Johnson’s language renews the world- the troubling beauty that takes our hearts."

—Angela Ball, Mississippi Review