Uncommon Prayer: Poems
(Karen and Michael Braziller Books, 2014)
In this stirring third collection, bursting with spoken and unspoken desire, Kimberly Johnson continues her ecstatic intertwining of the liturgical and the rugged landscape of the American West. Uncommon Prayer is a book about desire, and about the ways in which desire can and cannot be expressed, contained, or controlled by language. Invoking the structural organization of the liturgical hours, the calendar, and the alphabet, Uncommon Prayer explores how external forms might compensate for the incommunicability of human want—that is, how the parts of expression that aren’t found in dictionary definitions might help to make up for what our words never quite manage to express.