1.
Dappled Things
Mirror Box Visions
Tail
In Full Velvet
The Bus Ride
In the Dream
Severe
Elegy at Twice the Speed of Sound
Dorothy’s Trash
There Are New Worlds
Altitudes
2.
Ladies’ Arm Wrestling Night at the Blue Moon Diner
Folsom Street Fairytale
Spaces
Pine Street Barbershop
Vigil
Desire Among Sparrows
Souvenirs
Little Apophat
Fish Out of Water
Victory
Aria
Late Bloom
Notes
$2500 marketing and publicity budget
Co-op available
Galleys available: national mailings, with special push to
publications that have previously published Johnson
Special outreach to publications with LGBTQ and feminist
interests
Partnered events with the Whiting Foundation
Online advertising campaign at relevant literary blogs like
Literary Hub, and linked contributions at websites like Electric
Literature, the Rumpus, and Buzzfeed
Electronic postcard to announce publication sent to Johnson's
contacts
Author will promote print and eBook editions via her own social
media
Newsletter and catalog feature mailed to Sarabande's database of
contacts
Internet marketing campaign to include announcement on Sarabande
national listserv as well as review copy mailing to online journals
and blogs
Jenny Johnson: Jenny Johnson is a 2015 recipient of a Whiting Award and a 2016-2017 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2012, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics.
BOMB Magazine, "2023 Small Press Gift Guide"Autostraddle, “45 Queer
and Feminist Books You Need to Read in Early 2017" Academy of
American Poets, “Most Anticipated Collections”Signature Reads, “28
Breathtaking Poetry Books to Read Now”
Harvard Book Store Staff Recommendation
"In this stunningly lyrical debut, Johnson probes issues of queer
culture and love from an array of existential perspectives,
creating a melodic and thought-provoking symphony on queer
identity…. [A] miniature opus, alternately joyful and heartrending,
achingly bittersweet.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"For the empathetic daydreamer who has cut up every one of their
tees."—BOMB Magazine, "2023 Small Press Gift Guide"
“The queer and blazing ecosystem Johnson establishes situates dyke
bars in forests and forests in dyke bars, under swells of gym-class
parachutes, all rendered in the jazz of Johnson’s lyricism.
Vociferous, deciduous, fresh, and knowing, Johnson’s poems create a
space in which readers can reveal themselves and dig
deep.”—Booklist
"Half riot, half rapture, she reaches into poetic form and sings
the most contemporary vernacular. I feel in the presence of the
most ancient of poetic powers in these poems.—Kazim Ali, Poetry
Foundation, "Reading List: April 2018"
“Radical…. If In Full Velvet is a map of Johnson’s mind and memory,
it is one worth saving. Johnson is precise with herself, patient
with others. These poems celebrate the feeling of spinning in tight
circles until all that is left the spiral, rushing from the inside
out.”—Ploughshares
“The queer valentine of the century…. A valentine-as-testament to
the mysteries and mandates of human love….to queer human love...to
perfect unrequited love, trenchant in memory...to imperfect
requited love, more trenchant in memory still…. Perhaps most
necessary and astonishing of all, this is a valentine to self-love
and the elusive search for it…. Because of these poems, I see and
more than see—they cause a wild trilling in my veins—the many quiet
wonders of the world.”—The Rumpus
"Reading the right poem can pull you into yourself and gives you
the magnifying glass you need to understand your own guts. It’s
cheaper than therapy and calmer than journaling. Reading Jenny
Johnson’s debut poetry collection, In Full Velvet, is more like a
wielding a telescope. From the barber shop, the bedroom, the dyke
bar, the street and the quiet corners of the heart, Johnson’s
poetry speaks into the story of queerness…. The poems in this work
contain so much at once and transition fluidly between themes,
scenes and stories. These marks of authenticity create intimacy
with the author and blur the line between her story and our
collective truth.”—Autostraddle
"Is there a better gift than brand new poetry?" —Bustle
“Johnson’s first book of poems takes on subject matter such as
growing up queer in America and how politicized the queer female
body is. Her imagery is sharp, and she consistently brings us into
liminal and charged spaces...reminding us that states of transition
and what is considered in between have always been a part of human
experience that is in constant relationship to change and flux, as
gender is.”—Academy of American Poets
“Jenny Johnson is a poet of deep compassion and mesmerizing range.
Her work probes the complexities of queer identity and the body,
weaving in the unexpected reaches of intimacy and communion found
in nature, dreams and lost family histories. The transformative
power of community in the face of discrimination and intolerance is
also felt throughout much of her work.”—The Rumpus
“Jenny Johnson’s lyrical collection is a gorgeous, saturated
distillation of desire. Weaving into these poems the language of
botany and zoology, Johnson explores queer identity and
politics.”—Little Infinite
"Jenny Johnson’s debut book In Full Velvet is a stunning collection
of formally composed poems. By adopting and pushing against poetic
form, Johnson sustains a tension that expresses a wide emotional
range, including joy, rage, desire, love and need for acceptance.
The poems throughout this book explore how we think of the body,
gender identity and the relationship between nature and love. . .
.[In Full Velvet is] a collection of poems that sustain[s] an
emotional intensity and poetic virtuosity worthy of the recognition
it has garnered."—Tupelo Quarterly
“Johnson is deft at capturing flashes of experience and spinning
them into something more sublime. . . . In Full Velvet beautifully
presents Johnson as a poet fulfilling big expectations.”—Pittsburgh
City Paper
“The rigor and formal poise of Jenny Johnson’s work creates an
astounding emotional tension. There’s a sinuous,
shape-shifting quality to this work that makes her poetic
explorations of sex and selfhood all the more resonant. That subtle
mastery of line and rhyme is a powerful complement to the poems’
organic commemorating, interrogating, searching. The judges were
reminded of the virtuosity that characterizes a master like
Elizabeth Bishop; of the profound and active depths, and how her
poems ripple with need, and the desire for unity, communion,
transformation.”—Whiting Awards Committee
"Jenny Johnson's debut stunned me with its mix of electricity and
grace, form and freedom. These highly sensual poems blow across the
surface of everyday life—the dive bar, the barbershop, a
river—rustling up the glitter and the dirt. Studded with unexpected
language and infused with a generosity toward the natural world
(which, Johnson reminds us, is our own), In Full Velvet is rich
with fur, fishtails, and desire that feels true." —Hannah J,
Harvard Book Store Staff Recommendation
"I know it's hard to get poetry on the year-end lists, but damn,
this book is so good and deserves all the praise that comes its
way. Formally stunning poems about love, lust, queerness, and the
natural world. Johnson's lines hum with precision and
liveliness." —Daley Farr, Milkweed Books, Minneapolis
“The sheer joy of Jenny Johnson's poems finds fuel in the work of
poets she loves (Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Larry Levis), in
the wild variety revealed by botany and zoology, in the insights of
queer and gender theory, in dyke bars and dancing, and most of all
in love and desire--that imperative to which, directly or less so,
every other element in this list is in service. When someone writes
the history of American poetry in our time, the new energies
released among the generation now publishing first books will be
unmistakable; Johnson strides into a public space secured for her
by Rich and Lorde and a host of others, and makes it brilliantly
her own."—Mark Doty
“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.” —Brenda Shaughnessy
“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. Like this, her poems enliven my
seeing and my thinking about what a poem might do and what a world
might be.” —Aracelis Girmay
“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.” —Heather Love
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