In Full Velvet was published by Sarabande Books. Currently, you can order it here through Bookshop.
“Pulsing with a formal brilliance and an idiosyncratic lyricism, these poems counter a poetics of ecological crisis by instead enacting a poetics of a shared world within which the human is one species among the species. They pulse, too, with music and the grace of a world filled with strangeness and ardor. Johnson’s diction, raucous and taut, reminds me that English is among the animal sounds we animals make. Her poems enliven my seeing and my thinking about what a poem might do and what a world might be.”
“Maybe a voice from the ancients whispers to Jenny Johnson—Sappho or the Muse Euterpe—how to sing of love and death and joy and reality in as many registers as they come in life. Or maybe Johnson is just a genius. In either scenario (though the latter seems the obvious one) the pen of this poet flows with hard-won Old Soul ink—blood and tears and juice and kisses. This breathtaking debut is erotic, sublime, dappled and riven with ripe fruit, wild body, and full-on fauna. Lesbian literary history (and the many queer-hearted literatures that keep us alive) has a new chapter here, inscribed In Full Velvet by this magnificently gifted poet.”
“Jenny Johnson describes the awkwardness and pain as well as the incalculable pleasure of living at odds with nature. Defiant, winking, and rippling with laughter, In Full Velvet walks us (in boy jeans) through a queer landscape of acrylic fur, dappled flanks, and antlers hot to the touch. This story of a “heart hunting after a body” does not promise full recovery: even better, it’s an invitation to spend a few hours in the dyke bar at the end of the world.”