Ghost River

Kris Johnson is from America’s Washington state but has lived in the UK since 2007. She received her MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University where she has also taught and worked as a researcher. In 2019, she was awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies, including Ambit, Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry London. Her debut pamphlet, Skinny Dip, was published in 2022 by Enchiridion. Her first book-length collection, Ghost River, is published by Bloodaxe in 2023.

11 Bodies of Water
13 Rainier
14 Lake Americana
15 Yellow Jackets
16 Skinny Dip
17 The Desiccation
19 What I meant when I said goodnight
20 The Doe
22 He Is Risen
23 Nisqually Delta Blue
24 Ghost River
27 Blue

PASSAGE
35 Theoretical Geographers
36 V is for Vancouver
37 The principled process of deduction
38 Church
39 Vancouver, dreaming
40 Pseudotsuga menziesii
41 Kulshan
42 Rainier
43 Having considered with impartiality the excellencies & deficiencies of the land
44 The burial rituals of the inhabitants
45 In the name of, and for, His Britannic Majesty, His Heirs and successors
46 Your America
47 Passage
48 The death of George Vancouver
49 I dream I am held
50 Indivisible
51 In the Discovery sloop of war
52 George Vancouver, you are not my father

55 Myth
56 We Have Kissed the Four-legged Gods Goodnight
57 Lunar Distances
59 Corona
60 Cottonwood
61 The Time of Lace
62 American Mustard
63 Cast of an Irish Deer
64 None of us is where we ought to be
65 As ash falls on my mother’s garden
66 What you hold
67 Tectonics
68 Tahoma
69 Northwest Passage
71 Gather

72 Notes