Farrar, Straus & Giroux, hardcover
Publication Date: March 14, 2023
Publisher Marketing: The seventh book of poems from Devin Johnston, a poet who can "change the way you breathe" (Maureen N. McLane).
Dragons is a collection of sonorous, sensual poems from Devin Johnston, "one of the finest craftsmen of verse we have" (Michael Autrey, Booklist). Attentive to both the physical world and our place in it, his arresting images of nature and human life ring with quiet power. An elegy for a ten-year-old hen; a fourth grader seeing a fox, his "fur waistcoat immaculate"; the sound of neighbors arguing set against the "pallid flames" of the setting sun: together, such scenes form a resonant, restrained meditation on life's journey and "the feeling of time."