Jonathan Johnson is a poet unafraid to seek wisdom, even as the bewilderment of longing floods like shadowsaor perhaps lightainto every day. We are alive now, these poems remind us. In response to that beautiful and difficult truth, Johnson offers the sincerity of his fullest attentions and speaks in a voice as fluent in the intricacies of consciousness as it is in the tender directness of elegy. In this new collection, imagination is a migratory instinct that leads across a vast home range of shorelines, northern forests and companionable sidewalks. Traveling these rich physical territories and correspondent territories of the human heart with Johnson, the reader finds ample reason for gratitude and the grace to inhabit the moment as it passes away.

Jonathan began writing the Daily Spiritual Vitamin in 1997. It began after a conversation with a local businessman who confessed to not having extra time to spend in God's Word each morning, before heading off to work. This seemed to be true of many other people that Jonathan spoke to. Jonathan thought that perhaps sending over a short word of encouragement, including a Bible verse, and having it arrive in a person's inbox as they began their busy day, just might be the thing they needed. What began as a simple message sent out to a handful of individuals has grown over the years. With a daily audience of over 200 people, spreading throughout the United States, the Daily Spiritual Vitamin offers a word of encouragement and is a source of blessing to many. The entire project is based on Hebrews 3:13. It is not written as if it were taken from the pages of a Seminary book, but rather directly from the heart of a person who simply wishes to take what God has and is showing him, and share it with others in an effort to lift them up and bless them.

The Desk on the Sea begins four years after American poet Jonathan Johnson spread his mother's ashes in her beloved Lake Superior and moved with his wife and young daughter into a seventeenth-century cottage on Scotland's North Sea. On an idyllic, desolate coast and in the wild Highlands, Johnson began his search for a way to live through ongoing grief and to take in the wonder of each new day. Through years of extraordinary suffering by way of multiple ailments, Johnson's mother, Sheila, endured an astounding number of amputations-a toe, the end of a finger, a foot, whole fingers, the other foot. What she lost in her physical being, she gained in her kindness and generosity. By the time she was told that the only way she could survive a little longer was the amputation of both hands, she was capable of giving those who loved her and herself a beautiful death instead. Inspired by her example of grace and awareness, Johnson and his family gave themselves one year on the coast of Scotland to live by Shelia's great, guiding principle: We don't get the days back. They wandered trails along windswept shores and past the stone ruins left by people who'd come and gone before. They played as characters from Harry Potter on deserted beaches. From their cottage, they watched an island lighthouse, counting the seconds between flashes to know exactly when to say ""goodnight"" so the lighthouse would answer with a wink. The Desk on the Sea is a chronicle of progress toward one man's new life goal-to be a father, husband, and poet worthy of his mother's legacy. Sustained by an unwavering belief that words can help us fully occupy our lives, and that imagination and empathy can transform suffering into what John Keats called ""soul-making,"" Johnson offers readers a raw look at love and loss.

Longing for a home in big, wild country that would keep them passionate and young, Jonathan Johnson and his wife, Amy, set out to build a log cabin on his family's land in a remote and beautiful corner of Idaho. But what began as a doable dream for the two of them suddenly looks quite different when, on their first morning in the cabin--without electricity, a telephone, running water, or real windows--the couple learn that Amy is pregnant. In this lyrical and intimate chronicle of making a home the hard way, Johnson describes the competing joys and anxieties of preparing for fatherhood in a setting as challenging as it is promising: a paradise of mythic snowfalls and warming wood stoves and elk tracks at the front door, but also a place where vision, and even struggle and compromise, are not always enough. "Hannah and the Mountain" tells a rare and delicate story of two people exploring the unmapped territories of loss and grief and finding solace and grace in the mountains. It offers the reader an unforgettable portrait of a couple growing up, learning nature's hard and beautiful lessons, and discovering a love of place and each other strong and wild enough to renew them and be carried into the future