Kimberly Johnson was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1971. She earned an M.A. degree at The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars in 1995, and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1997. She went on to complete a Ph.D. in English, with a specialization in Renaissance Literature, at the University of California-Berkeley in 2003. Since 2003, she has taught Renaissance Literature and Creative Writing at BYU in Provo, Utah. She lives in the Sugarhouse neighborhood of Salt Lake City.
Johnson is a poet, translator, and scholar of early modern literature. Her fourth collection of poetry, Fatal, is forthcoming from Persea Books. She has also published book-length translations of major poems from antiquity, including the Georgics of Virgil, which was published as part of the landmark Penguin Classics series in 2009, and Hesiod’s two great poems of the 7th century BCE, Theogony and Works and Days, which were released in a single volume by Northwestern University Press in 2017. With her spouse Jay Hopler, also a poet, Johnson edited Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale University Press, 2013) which surveyed the development of religious verse from antiquity through the present day.
Johnson has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has held visiting fellowships at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah and at the American Academy in Rome. Her scholarly work has been recognized with awards from the John Donne Society and the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association.
When she’s not in the classroom, Johnson can be found running, cross-country skiing, rock climbing, hiking, and camping in the mountains and deserts of Utah.
Works
Ash Garden
Ash Garden
Spring begins in a fatness of front lawns,
but not mine. I whose blowtorch urge approaches
the ascetic, whose resolve to bury
luxuriance grows raw-handed from shoveling,
have duly torched and shoveled grass until
the baked blades crumpled like old palm fronds
and their upturned roots drooped. Let spring begin
in ash and dust, I say, and bloom as little
as possible out of them. I’m planting
stonecrop, and rockmat, and if the fireweed
insists on sowing itself in cinders
I’ll truckle it to my lenten aesthetic
or pluck it out: I’ll parch the ground six weeks
to prompt by thirst the fireweed’s fancy,
gratuitous pink to put on the drab.
Let it learn in sackcloth colors to thrive
on desire alone. It’s a discipline
I’m ripe to teach. I excel at fasting.
Three Bouquets
Three Bouquets
1.
What awful love worked this superfluity?
My U.S. Geological Survey map
grids the haphazard landscape into restrained
geometries, bulges and sandstone hoodoos
smoothed by the benign cursive of contour lines.
But look!— At the chart’s least cluttered corner,
the cartographer abandoned
his strict piety to boutonnière
the desert: a compass rose, its freehand
arabesques transgress the quadrants, a baroque
whimsy of the official pen. I imagine him
gripping silent his staves and theodolite,
stumped by some unmappable beauty, it bucking
his measure, efflorescing in him—.
Heartstruck he tricks out the plateau in posies…
2.
Fond romantic, I’ve followed the map farther
than asphalt, taken myself up to the bare
coordinates where the compass rose blooms.
I’m quick to see the cartographer’s flourish
as a valentine, quicker to want what beauty
forced its mark here, to lose my bearings by it:
let my north be this rosy seduction
of sandstone flashed with quartz, my east that far, high mountain
shining like all the kingdoms of the world.
3.
My dear cartographer, how misplaced our faith
in the compass rose, as if its love-knot
could fix beauty. As if it marked anything
but the heart’s excesses. My own heart surges
to pitch its rococo against the map’s hard facts.
It is willing to break itself to flower.
Matins for the Last Frost
Matins for the Last Frost
Patient in their dark hibernacle
wait the twinned lobes of the tulip bulb
hanging like a semicolon
in the endless sentence of winter;
not yet the green shaft rips the paper tunic
in its upward thrust, not yet knifes its tip
through the topsoil, the stalk aspiring
up to a swelling of petals, pale
bud pursed and then loosened, deepening
to red and unsealing itself sash by sash,
a leggy dishabille in lipstick.
Somewhere on the other side of town
some bells begin to raise their brazen;
everything is about to change—
Cowpunch
Cowpunch
Unhobble your hardscrabble horses, soul—
The night before us is steep and long,
And the steers won’t drive themselves. They moan
In the gloaming, and clack horns
One to another’s as to the comfort
Of fenceposts. Their nerves are barbed wire.
Footsore and far from pasture, we fret
A course across the endless range, the sage flats
A gray disorientation
Of spooks and noise to all horizons.
I with my whistle, my whipcrack
Consistency, am their only known thing,
And they will follow me anywhere:
To the hilltop, the feedlot, the bolt gun’s
Red floor. The wind is picking up,
Trawling its weather; snow will hard fall
Like a heavy body and shove the dawn back down,
And if we, frostburnt, snowblind, shoulder
Through the storm to find our destination
It will kill us. Soul, I will follow you anywhere.
Poetry collections
- Fatal, Persea Books, 2022
- Uncommon Prayer, Persea Books, 2014
- A Metaphorical God, Persea Books, 2008
- Leviathan with a Hook, Persea Books, 2002
Ash Garden
Ash Garden
Spring begins in a fatness of front lawns,
but not mine. I whose blowtorch urge approaches
the ascetic, whose resolve to bury
luxuriance grows raw-handed from shoveling,
have duly torched and shoveled grass until
the baked blades crumpled like old palm fronds
and their upturned roots drooped. Let spring begin
in ash and dust, I say, and bloom as little
as possible out of them. I’m planting
stonecrop, and rockmat, and if the fireweed
insists on sowing itself in cinders
I’ll truckle it to my lenten aesthetic
or pluck it out: I’ll parch the ground six weeks
to prompt by thirst the fireweed’s fancy,
gratuitous pink to put on the drab.
Let it learn in sackcloth colors to thrive
on desire alone. It’s a discipline
I’m ripe to teach. I excel at fasting.
Three Bouquets
Three Bouquets
1.
What awful love worked this superfluity?
My U.S. Geological Survey map
grids the haphazard landscape into restrained
geometries, bulges and sandstone hoodoos
smoothed by the benign cursive of contour lines.
But look!— At the chart’s least cluttered corner,
the cartographer abandoned
his strict piety to boutonnière
the desert: a compass rose, its freehand
arabesques transgress the quadrants, a baroque
whimsy of the official pen. I imagine him
gripping silent his staves and theodolite,
stumped by some unmappable beauty, it bucking
his measure, efflorescing in him—.
Heartstruck he tricks out the plateau in posies…
2.
Fond romantic, I’ve followed the map farther
than asphalt, taken myself up to the bare
coordinates where the compass rose blooms.
I’m quick to see the cartographer’s flourish
as a valentine, quicker to want what beauty
forced its mark here, to lose my bearings by it:
let my north be this rosy seduction
of sandstone flashed with quartz, my east that far, high mountain
shining like all the kingdoms of the world.
3.
My dear cartographer, how misplaced our faith
in the compass rose, as if its love-knot
could fix beauty. As if it marked anything
but the heart’s excesses. My own heart surges
to pitch its rococo against the map’s hard facts.
It is willing to break itself to flower.
Matins for the Last Frost
Matins for the Last Frost
Patient in their dark hibernacle
wait the twinned lobes of the tulip bulb
hanging like a semicolon
in the endless sentence of winter;
not yet the green shaft rips the paper tunic
in its upward thrust, not yet knifes its tip
through the topsoil, the stalk aspiring
up to a swelling of petals, pale
bud pursed and then loosened, deepening
to red and unsealing itself sash by sash,
a leggy dishabille in lipstick.
Somewhere on the other side of town
some bells begin to raise their brazen;
everything is about to change—
Cowpunch
Cowpunch
Unhobble your hardscrabble horses, soul—
The night before us is steep and long,
And the steers won’t drive themselves. They moan
In the gloaming, and clack horns
One to another’s as to the comfort
Of fenceposts. Their nerves are barbed wire.
Footsore and far from pasture, we fret
A course across the endless range, the sage flats
A gray disorientation
Of spooks and noise to all horizons.
I with my whistle, my whipcrack
Consistency, am their only known thing,
And they will follow me anywhere:
To the hilltop, the feedlot, the bolt gun’s
Red floor. The wind is picking up,
Trawling its weather; snow will hard fall
Like a heavy body and shove the dawn back down,
And if we, frostburnt, snowblind, shoulder
Through the storm to find our destination
It will kill us. Soul, I will follow you anywhere.
