The Vast Kingdom of Nowhere is a narrative prose poem sequence that journeys into the life of a young American woman in an isolated army camp on Salisbury Plain. As her husband prepares for deployment to Afghanistan, she finds herself increasingly ill at ease in her marriage and her relationship to the military. Her disquiet is mirrored in the landscape she finds herself in. Wiltshire’s pastoral surroundings conceal their function as the training ground for war. She spends her days in a bucolic idyll permeated with threat: tanks, firing ranges, unexploded bombs, and the dead.
The poems meditate on ecology and displacement, gender and otherness, and question what it means to occupy foreign territory. Examining the imprint of the military on the landscape and those who inhabit it, The Vast Kingdom of Nowhere offers an unconventional portrait of a military wife and of domestic life set against the backdrop of war. It follows Kris Johnson’s highly praised debut collection, Ghost River, which was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize and longlisted for the Laurel Prize.
'The Vast Kingdom of Nowhere is electrifying in its sense of displacement and anxiety, in its scrutiny of the army as an institution from ground level, and in its evocation of waiting, landscape and solitude.’ – Sean O’Brien
‘The Vast Kingdom of Nowhere is a botany of loneliness, a startling account of what it is to be at home when someone is at war and a brilliant meditation on double-vision, which is more like double-dwelling in both a landscape experienced and a landscape remembered.' – Jacob Polley
Praise for Ghost River:
'Kris Johnson's Ghost River is a book full of water – from the beautiful and dangerous lakes from the landscape of childhood to the waterways mapped by George Vancouver in the late 1700s. Mapping – of space, place and connection – is abundant in these poems, which explore family history, birth and motherhood with extraordinary and tender precision of language. The natural world rises through Johnson's writing, both in real manifestations and as metaphor, and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest forms the backbone of this collection, which is both wonderful and full of wonder.' – Hannah Lowe
'I’ve waited so long for Kris Johnson’s beautiful book, dark and deep as the forests and waters of her Pacific Northwest. Time, change, loss and the luminous transformations of motherhood are here in exquisite and unflinching detail. Flooded with the wonders of the natural world, these poems are at once a map of the landscape and a map of the human heart.' – Liz Berry
'Kris Johnson offers a mythic sense of the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, fuelled by a complex sense of belonging – and of the feminine dimension of place which lends her work a subtly erotic and immersive quality. The poems encompass both the lyric and the dramatic, and she has an exceptional ear for cadence and timing. While she renews and recalibrates the imaginative world we may glimpse in the work of James Wright, Roethke and Annie Dillard, she is also clearly possessed of an individual vision and song. What most excites me is the unity of thought, feeling and musicality.' – Sean O'Brien
‘I loved Ghost River by Kris Johnson and especially admired its deft delivery of tricky themes with sharpness, lightness and nuance. As the title suggests, water is a central image in the collection, and one Johnson manages to refresh in various ways – alongside the ghostly legacies of familial grief, colonial and ecological traumas […] It’s a great achievement to weave these themes so artfully and readably through a collection which has so much beautiful writing in it. If you’re interested in complex, layered, exquisitely crafted ecopoetry, then read this book.’ – Caleb Parkin, Under the Radar
'This debut collection is steeped in deep ecology and a fascination for the land that exists beneath naming and mapping ... These are musical, lyrical poems that evoke the majesty of landscape, the depth and power of water and invite us to stop, and look again.' – Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon, on Ghost River
‘This is centred on the landscape of America’s Pacific Northwest, but it is no rural idyll: ruggedly beautiful, steeped in myth and mystery, but also dark and dangerous … Impossible to do this rich and complex collection justice in a short review: it will reward frequent rereading and group discussion.’ – Frank Startup, The School Librarian, on Ghost River
Kris Johnson reads from Ghost River at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Kris reads eight poems from Ghost River: 'Rainier', 'Bodies of Water', 'Ghost River', 'Theoretical Geographers', 'Pseudotsuga menziesii', 'Passage', 'Northwest Passage' and 'Tectonics'.
Ireland & EU: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin
USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org
