ANTIPSALM by Wayne Johns
About this edition:
Poetry, 98 pages.
6.00" x 8.25" softcover,
Smyth-sewn binding.
ISBN 978-0-87775-035-2.
Released 15 November 2018.
About this edition:
Poetry, 98 pages.
6.125" x 8.500" hardcover,
Smyth-sewn binding.
ISBN 978-0-87775-037-6.
With dust jacket.
Released 15 November 2018.
About this edition:
Poetry, 98 pages.
6.125" x 8.500" hardcover,
Smyth-sewn binding.
ISBN 978-0-87775-037-6.
With dust jacket.
Released 15 November 2018.
Advance praise for Antipsalm:
“Spooky, devastating, and ultimately tragic, Wayne Johns’ Antipsalm is as real a love story as you’re going to find. Its sinuous weave of story and song lures the reader to resurrect the fragments of a buried past: the object here is to rifle through drawers, study their remnant coins and photographs, leaf through old papers, and uncover, ultimately, the face of the beloved. I am so haunted by the beauty of these poems, my hair stands on end: Antipsalm pulls the ghosts from out the walls.”
—CATE MARVIN, author of Oracle
“I‘m not sure if Wayne Johns is a master of or a slave to the elegiac mode. I do know that the poems in Antipsalm are religiously devoted to their search for proof that romantic love amounts to more than longing and that death isn’t the only possible end to such longing. Much has been said about the spiritual impulse in poetry, but Johns adds a fresh voice to that long tradition, and that voice sings with a singular resonance. What a brilliantly well-crafted and heartbreaking debut!”
—JERICHO BROWN, author of The Tradition
From Antipsalm:
RESTLESSNESS
Since some will ask about this
place called us, it looked out
on a field of sunflowers beneath green
mountains that vanished in mist.
We were convinced happiness lived
there, or somewhere like it. And weren’t we
happy there? In the gleaming kitchen
that final morning, two flawless sunflowers,
a postcard propped against the vase.
No message, or hint, just a P.S.:
Retrieve. And don’t forget Love,
What saved us still saves us.
Now I know that too should
have ended with a question.
WAYNE JOHNS is the author of two chapbooks: The Exclusion Zone (winner of the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Prize) and An Invisible Veil Between Us (winner of the Frank O’ Hara Chapbook Award). His poems have appeared in New England Review, Ploughshares, Image, Meridian, Prairie Schooner, and Best New Poets, among others. A Lambda Literary Emerging Voices Fellow in fiction, his short stories have appeared in Gaslight: Lambda Fellows Anthology and Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Voices of North Carolina (UNC Press, 2019). He currently serves as a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal.
