Name: An Author Event with A.R. Johnson
Start: 2024-11-22T18:00:00-05:00
Location: East Tennessee History Center

Union Ave Books is excited to present A.R. Johnson for Picture Album. This free event will take place on November 22nd at 6pm at the East Tennessee History Center. Please RSVP here so we know to expect you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A.R. (Rick) Johnson is a native East Tennessean who spent his childhood summers and weekends on his grandmother’s farm, located near the banks of the French Broad River, and his poems reflect a deep connection to the land, its people, and the seasons that shape it. His career has been in business, and he has also led several non-profit corporations and serves on the boards of philanthropic organizations across Tennessee. He lives and works in Knoxville and Nashville and is married to the playwright Mary Donnet Johnson. They have two children, Mary Margaret and Pace.
His poems have appeared in the Connecticut River Review, the Wisconsin Review, the New York Times, and the Cortland Review. He was an invited contributor in poetry to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference from 2012 to 2019, and his manuscript, Pennyroyal and Other Poems, was shortlisted for the 2019 Grayson Books Poetry Prize.
Poet and National Book Award winner B. H. Fairchild writes that Johnson’s poetry “brings…flawless, unforgiving memories of the rural lives of past generations and a poet’s word-hoard of figure and image that renders the past immediate and vivid.”
Novelist, poet, and Middlebury College professor Jay Parini says that this latest collection, Picture Album, is “marvelous work, to savor, to reread eagerly,” and Mary Jo Salter, editor of The Best American Poetry 2024, says its “elegiac mood is pervasive but somehow affirmative. This poet…can only bring us pleasure.”
ABOUT THE BOOK
Picture Album is a collection of poems that range from elegiac to lighthearted, filled with word pictures that take the reader from a creek bed to a corner of the backyard, from a summer hayfield to an urban winter street. There are images imagined, remembered, and soberingly real, people familiar and familial, and always there is the sense of place and season, of noticing the commonplace and just how uncommonly beautiful and important it can be.
The book is divided into four sections, each with a thematic tone and subject. The poems in the first one are words of reflection, remembered circumstances and the lessons and regrets associated with them, places – and those who inhabited them – that are the everyday experiences of life that become extraordinary when they are noticed and carefully considered.
The poems in the second section are whimsical, full of wordplay, and “intelligent,” as one critic called them. They are humorous, sometimes delightfully challenging, and clearly in love with the musicality of poetry.
The third is closely tied to seasons and the weather, how light looks, shadows fall, and birds and other animals make us see ourselves differently by seeing them. The final section is largely a remembrance of the hollows, ridges, and hilltops of a homeplace that was a “threadbare farm” and those who were there in a time “at the end.”
Acclaimed and nationally awarded writers have praised the book, calling it “marvelous,” “affirmative,” “vividly constructed,” and “magic.” Poet, novelist, and screenwriter Jay Parini says “I just loved reading the poems in Picture Album. This is marvelous work, to savor, to reread regularly.”
Sidney Wade, author of Deep Gossip, New and Selected Poems, says “…this author’s delicious imagination is a gathering of images from the life of a family man who is acutely aware of the natural world around him…” Mary Jo Salter, editor of The Best American Poetry 2024, says “Joy in language…emerges in power-packed poems,” and Mark Jarman, Vanderbilt University professor emeritus and author of Zeno’s Eternity, writes that Johnson, “with a true poet’s humility…again and again, in poem after, poem finds meaning.”
B. H. Fairchild, author of An Ordinary Life and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, says “A.R. Johnson brings many talents to the task of poetry – for him, I think, an almost sacred task requiring intimate knowledge of the natural world, flawless, unforgiving memories of the rural lives of past generations, and a poet’s word-hoard of figure and image. Such is what in ancient times confused poetry with magic, and so here it is again in Picture Album.”