A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky

by Melissa Fite Johnson

A chapbook collection of poetry.

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“A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky is shot through with loss, with the ways our bodies fail us, and with what we can’t—or don’t say. The speakers are daughters, wives, not-mothers, and they occupy domestic spaces in which “nothing is missing.” Indeed, everything is present in Melissa Fite Johnson’s elegiac collection, even the empty spaces: a remembered father, the children not to be born, the past that is at once long-gone and not gone at all.”

—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

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“Melissa Fite Johnson’s A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky is like a poetry photo album where poems appear like perfect snapshots of a life being lived. Johnson’s poems question “what it means to be human”—what we hold onto and what we let go. The narrative beauty of these poems lead us into a garden where branches “quilt patterns into the sky”—the possibility of becoming a parent and the experience of losing one. This
chapbook grounds us in the past and present and connects the two worlds—leaving me thankful for this poet who opens the door for us to walk into her poems and join her.

—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Hourglass Museum

Genres: Poetry

32 pages, Paperback

Published January 25, 2018

About the author

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of Green (forthcoming, Riot in Your Throat). She holds a BSEd in English and an MA in creative writing and literature from Pittsburg State University in Kansas. Her publications include Pleiades, SWWIM, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Stirring, Broadsided Press, Whale Road Review. Her first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), and her second, Ghost Sign (Spartan Press, 2016), which she co-authored, were both named Kansas Notable Books. She is also the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Melissa and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, Kansas, where she teaches high school English. Please feel free to connect with Melissa at melissafitejohnson@gmail.com.

Reviews

[Shuly · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems take the reader on a journey of a father-daughter relationship, of a woman grappling with the choices she has made about love and motherhood, and about understanding the past in a new way given the passage of time, and with it, a change of light. Melissa's poems are always accessible and pack a punch. I've read her work in the past in many publications, but this is the first collection of hers I have been lucky enough to own. I am looking forward to the next.

[Caleb Hoyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poems is gorgeous and deceptive. The gorgeousness is self-evident and overflowing, both in the book's subject matter of parents and children and in the potency of its language, imagery, and storytelling. I say that it is deceptive because the tone of the majority of the poems is so effortlessly unpretentious and accessible that one is often not prepared for the keen intelligence of them, the sometimes brutal emotional honesty, and the emotional wallop that they pack. Melissa Fite Johnson is a seemingly fearless writer, clearly delving into her personal experience without ever veering into Dear Diary territory. She is so specific in her examination and reflection of her own history that her poems end up being universal. I look forward to revisiting the poems in this collection in the future to see what new things they have to tell me about Melissa's world and my own.

[Greg Stapp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melissa Fite Johnson's "A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky" is an open-doored look into the dichotomy of being a person who has opted not to have children but yearns mournfully and happily for the memories of their childhood. Through sixteen well-crafted poems, Johnson examines the self as situated within this dichotomy with subtlety and grace. Well worth the read for lovers of poetry and for people interested in the nuanced examination of childhood and parenthood.