How to Catch a Falling Knife

"Daniel Johnson's collection reads like a contemporary creation myth---fanciful and funny and full of strong imagery, poignant surprises, narratives that lodge in the mind at the same time that they zoom us into unexpected, unpredicted places. These poems feel at once deeply introspective and completely at home in the public sphere, shaping and reshaping the sensibility of our times, introducing us to a new poetry, a voice for which we've been waiting without knowing it. This is a memorable collection by an important new poet."

"Daniel Johnson's debut book has an inventive exuberance of imagery that is startling and ominous. He gives us a beautifully unpredictable account of the everyday dangers among which body and spirit must move. And he celebrates the everyday, too, with great generosity of spirit and an energetic love of our baffling, irrepressible, unbearable lives."

"Fans of poets as disparate as Troy Jollimore, Dean Young and Billy Collins will love Johnson's How to Catch a Falling Knife-a mournful but wry homage to a childhood in the Rust Belt, to the subtle dangers of family, to overpowering love, to so many things. Johnson's voice is clear, distinct, and he creates an indelible world that could not have existed without his verse."

"How to Catch a Falling Knife is a perfect title for this book: there is danger, playfulness, impossibilities made possible, and surprise, in varying doses, in every poem! Most of all though, what I end up loving most about these spare, intense poems, is their heart, their urgent, nutty, burning, utterly whole heart."

Daniel Johnson was born in Salem, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including Bot American Poetry 2007, The Iowa Review, and / Have My Own Song for It: Modem Poems of Ohio. Johnson is founding executive director of the youth writing center 826 Boston and, for over a decade, has taught writing in public schools, hospitals, and prisons. He lives with his wife, Ebele, in Boston. To experience more of his work, visit www.danielbjohnson.com.