"The author puts forward a bracing theory of partial empathy....Johnston's searching book of thought-probes goes a long way toward allowing the reader the grounding that would allow him to make empathic contacts with the animals over which he ponders....Each time another animal becomes extinct a special and irretrievable way of looking at the world is gone....Perhaps the more people that read this book, the more this absence would be poignantly felt."--"The Brooklyn Rail"

""Creaturely," like its subjects, eludes definition. It's a book of exquisite essays--or are they prose poems--that tessellate into something larger: a meditation, perhaps, or a vision. Johnston's subject is at once the absolute otherness of the creatures with whom we share the world's everyday spaces--dogs, owls, mice, squirrels, crows--and the worth of our attempts to get to know them. Modest, calm, and beautiful, this is an exceptional book."--Robert Macfarlane

Devin Johnston teaches at St. Louis University. He was named a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for "Sources," published by Turtle Point Press.

The contributors to this issue of Plough Quarterly focus on what it means to bear witness to the gospel. Peggy Gish reports on the church’s response to Boko Haram in Nigeria, where thousands of Christians have been killed. But in addition to witnesses who die for their faith, there are those who live for it, such as the families of those who died in Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. And in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s move to redefine marriage, we can’t talk about Christian witness without considering marriage and sexuality. With insights from Russell Moore, N. T. Wright, Amy Carmichael, Pope Francis, George Fox, Ivan Illich, Julia Chaney-Moss, Nathaniel Peters, Channah Ben-Eliezer, Chico Fajardo-Heflin, Les Isaac, Paul Sanders, and Robert Paeglow, this issue is sure to stimulate reflection and discussion. And as if that weren’t enough, you also get world-class art by Caravaggio, August Macke, Eric Drooker, Denis Barsukov, Pablo Picasso, George Tooker, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Janice Earley, John Singer Sargent, Paul Sanders, Paul Klee, Ghislaine Howard, and others. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus’ message into practice and find common cause with others.

The poems in Devin Johnston's "Traveler" cross great distances, from the Red Hills of Kansas to the Rough Bounds of the Scottish Highlands, following weather patterns, bird migrations, and ocean voyages. Less literally, these poems move through translations and protean transformations. Their subjects are often next to nothing in several senses: cloud shadows racing across a valley before dusk, the predawn expectation of a child's birth, or the static-electric charge of clothing fabric. Throughout, Johnston offers vivid glimpses of the phenomenal world.

After a failed suicide attempt, Mie Faulkner is committed in a mental hospital where she befriends several other patients. With support from her new friends and psychiatrist, Mie truly begins to explore her illnesses and finally finds the motivation to confront them.

To be averse, to turn one's eyes away, is an act that chills, suggesting not only irrevocable but also unforeseeable consequence. And what we do not see, we so often fear. In ancient Rome, rites of aversion were performed as sacred rituals. But, as Johnston explains, such "rituals involved not the invocation of heavenly spirits, but the placation of ghosts." While the poems in this collection assay a very broad range of subjects, Johnston demonstrates in all of them an awareness of what enormous challenges constitute the turning toward--or away from--the many faces of experience. And at the core of this work is an astute, passionate, empathic examination of our use of language as an active placation of ghosts. " T]hese forms are only forms // fulfilled, as you are now // no more than this-a tone." Paradoxically, Johnston demonstrates the ways that these ghosted forms nonetheless can offer a music intensely, eerily immediate. Here the breadth and complexity of subject matter and allusion, the deftly drawn images (some in full relief, others sketched in minimal silhouette against a sharply contrasting background), the surprising alliances and complications of emotion and idea, all make it impossible for a reader to turn his or her eyes away.