"This Perfect Life follows an original, humorous grave quest 'into the world of flesh': a quest for silence, for opening to the spirit's plenitude, the body's plenitude." --Jean Valentine
"What I love about this luminous book is its courage, its wit, and its unrelenting honesty, but most of all I love the almost spiritual joy at its center, the calm there, the generosity, the strength." --Thomas Lux
"Kate Johnson's gift is to make the inner life so clear
and concrete as to fix a self to the page. She
confronts suffering without erasing the possibility of
love, or denying the presence of joy. Distilled and
direct, plain and mysterious at once, these poems
involve us in moments in the work of soul-making."
--Mark Doty
"Oh, where have we been exiled from--our families? Ourselves? The source of our spirit? Kate Johnson's voice calls out from the wilderness of right here--the wounded self surviving, human, ever asking to be healed. This poetry is both prayer and the grace it prays for: clear, rigorous, and infused with a love of this world where "we can't even see what it is we see by." --Marie Howe
Kate Knapp Johnson is also the author of a previous collection of poetry When Orchids Were Flowers.
A recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, Johnson teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is in the training program at The Westchester Institute for Psychoanalysis. She lives in Mt. Kisco, NY with her husband and children.
