“I’ve known Meg Johnson’s work for a few years, but not until now did I realize she’s been sitting on a rickety folding chair in a corner of my buzzy brain, transcribing the flukey rants and loopy ferocities that all of us--all of us—are feeling right now slash all the time. Pick up this book and eat it, I mean love it, I mean eat it.” —Daniel Handler
"To enter Meg Johnson’s poems in Without: Body, Name, Country is to enter a spiral staircase in a tower full of fun house mirrors: the language distorts the familiar into new but recognizable realities, sometimes wryly hilarious, sometimes hauntingly unsettling. The images in these poems will catch you like a trapeze artist, bending and contorting in wondrous ways. The poems explore the subject of girlhood: the speaker “is forever entering a room. Inhaling the cusp of capture.” In prose poems and free verse, Johnson excavates the topography of the body, of illness and anxiety, of politics and patriarchy, lamenting, “I guess I was supposed to be flattered because people said I was pretty. But it felt like a liability to me.” This liability of living in a body, gendered, fertilizes the landscape of all the imagery. Read this collection and marvel as different parts of you are “lighting up like a pin ball machine.”" —Anne Champion
"Meg Johnson’s third book of poems is a fierce, playful, unapologetic, and morally complex examination of life. The poems range from breezy to formally inventive, from serious-hilarious soliloquies about the vagaries of identity to psychologically insightful reports on the author’s own harrowing journey through womanhood and through illness. Without: Body, Name, Country is a deeply personal, brazenly satirical, and subtly political call to awakening. Those who enjoy memoir and poetry will find both forms seamlessly and searingly interwoven here." —Mark Leidner
"Without: Body, Name, Country is a blazing manifesta for our current world. Meg Johnson battles “the beast of chronic pain,” and navigates her survival from a sometimes-fatal disease with a ferocity that has to be read to be believed. “Post images of empty landscapes as / if no one has survived,” one poem demands of the reader. But these poems will survive, long after we are gone, and I, for one, feel lucky to have shared the earth with them." —Shaindel Beers
"To enter Meg Johnson’s poems in Without: Body, Name, Country is to enter a spiral staircase in a tower full of fun house mirrors: the language distorts the familiar into new but recognizable realities, sometimes wryly hilarious, sometimes hauntingly unsettling. The images in these poems will catch you like a trapeze artist, bending and contorting in wondrous ways. The poems explore the subject of girlhood: the speaker “is forever entering a room. Inhaling the cusp of capture.” In prose poems and free verse, Johnson excavates the topography of the body, of illness and anxiety, of politics and patriarchy, lamenting, “I guess I was supposed to be flattered because people said I was pretty. But it felt like a liability to me.” This liability of living in a body, gendered, fertilizes the landscape of all the imagery. Read this collection and marvel as different parts of you are “lighting up like a pin ball machine.”" —Anne Champion
"Meg Johnson’s third book of poems is a fierce, playful, unapologetic, and morally complex examination of life. The poems range from breezy to formally inventive, from serious-hilarious soliloquies about the vagaries of identity to psychologically insightful reports on the author’s own harrowing journey through womanhood and through illness. Without: Body, Name, Country is a deeply personal, brazenly satirical, and subtly political call to awakening. Those who enjoy memoir and poetry will find both forms seamlessly and searingly interwoven here." —Mark Leidner
"Without: Body, Name, Country is a blazing manifesta for our current world. Meg Johnson battles “the beast of chronic pain,” and navigates her survival from a sometimes-fatal disease with a ferocity that has to be read to be believed. “Post images of empty landscapes as / if no one has survived,” one poem demands of the reader. But these poems will survive, long after we are gone, and I, for one, feel lucky to have shared the earth with them." —Shaindel Beers
"Meg Johnson’s new poetry collection, Without: Body, Name, Country, is a memoir of implosion, and subsequent resurrection, told from a staccato beginning to a lyrical end. Starting with short, explosively irreverent poems, Johnson describes an idyllic youth of beauty and talent — as a dancer, budding poet, precocious thinker — all tainted by the lasciviousness that follows visual appeal. Then her poetry gradually lengthens into prose poetry, then straight micro-narratives, as we see that perfect world crumble with her diagnosis of Guillain-Barré syndrome in which a person’s immune system attacks the nerves. Her purposely blunt wording fully conveys the collapse of her world as her ability to walk wains. Frustration, fatigue, the fight to move again: all move toward a rebirth, that while imperfect, offers the peace of accepting how her body and spirit have changed. An excellent read!" —Martha Engber
"Meg Johnson’s third book of poetry, Without: Body, Name, Country, is a gem. Rough cut, full of sparkles and innumerable facets. Hold it up to the light, spin and gaze. You’ll find yourself delighted and returning again and again to the surprise and power of her words. That power includes a spot-on sense of humor evident from page one onward. In the collection’s first poem, “I Am a Midwestern Winter” she describes her collection of space heaters and growing up wearing a tutu over snow pants. Make no mistake though, Johnson is deadly serious, her humor only a sly opening to poetry and short nonfiction that challenges the status quo and tackles the sacred. She circles her own themes returning again and then one more time to investigate what it is to grow up pretty, to remain single after thirty, to face life-altering illness. There is a luster, a brilliance that grows throughout the collection with her keen attention not only to detail, but to the motivations of those around her."
—Joanne Nelson
"Meg Johnson’s third book of poetry, Without: Body, Name, Country, is a gem. Rough cut, full of sparkles and innumerable facets. Hold it up to the light, spin and gaze. You’ll find yourself delighted and returning again and again to the surprise and power of her words. That power includes a spot-on sense of humor evident from page one onward. In the collection’s first poem, “I Am a Midwestern Winter” she describes her collection of space heaters and growing up wearing a tutu over snow pants. Make no mistake though, Johnson is deadly serious, her humor only a sly opening to poetry and short nonfiction that challenges the status quo and tackles the sacred. She circles her own themes returning again and then one more time to investigate what it is to grow up pretty, to remain single after thirty, to face life-altering illness. There is a luster, a brilliance that grows throughout the collection with her keen attention not only to detail, but to the motivations of those around her."
—Joanne Nelson
"This is a well-crafted memoir of pain, physical and emotional, from beginning to end. Heavily weighted with what Johnson calls “vintage sadness,” it’s buoyed by the variety and quality of its poems." --Portland Book Review
"It all makes for terrific entertainment from a very fresh voice of observation of all things human. Delectable!"
--Grady Harp
"Evocative." --Andrea Blythe