In Reading Whispers, J. Chester Johnson offers an evocative innovation to the haiku. The Japanese form is one that offers a great spatial experience by presenting images that go beyond a narrative frame. J. Chester Johnson goes further by juxtaposing three haiku and adding a title to allow the images to reverberate even more. His American-style haiku follow in the footsteps of those Japanese writers who wrote linked verse. In this case, he arranges the links. A heartfelt collection!
—Kimiko Hahn
In his remarkable new book, "Reading Whispers", J. Chester Johnson has a haiku warn a poet “the longer you try/The smaller I get”, but there is nothing small in these pages; in fact, this is a book that shows you how much space there is between these strong, wise and open lines. Enough space to untangle our overloaded days. Enough space to fit a world, once the reader accepts this poet’s invitation to sit, take a breath. The closer we get the more we know.
—Cornelius Eady, Co/founder, Cave Canem; Winner, 2025 Wallace Stevens Award
Having written a whole book of Selected Longer Poems, Chester Johnson now shows himself equally adept at a compressed, intense shorter form that, at its frequent best, presents a whole world of emotion, conveys a whole experience, in nine brief lines.
—Edward Mendelson, Columbia University
“J. Chester Johnson’s work on racial injustice, primarily the essential Damaged Heritage, and the essays on race and racial healing that followed, inform these “triple haiku.” Yet, in this new volume, Reading Whispers, Book of Triple Haiku, his poetic voice is happily free of real certainties and absolutes; instead, it is playful with a gentle humor and wisdom. Among Johnson’s subjects are love, implied politics, mini meditations on race, aging, and mortality. The language, while clear in its feeling, is oblique, full of ambiguities, and enriched by surprising turns. Its truths are “at a slant,” as Emily Dickinson put it. Every poem offers an invitation to the reader to come back for a fresh read. This is heroic poetry beautifully understated.”
— Barry Wallenstein’s latest poetry books are Odd Men Out (or In) Xanadu Press, March 2025 Playing in Overtime, Ridgeway Press, September 2025.
J. Chester Johnson
Recent poetry and poetry-related books, authored by Johnson, are St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems (2010), Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems (2017), and Auden, the Psalms, and Me (2017), the story of the retranslation of the Psalms, now contained in the current Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church, for which W. H. Auden (1968-1971) and Johnson (1971-1979) were the poets on the Psalter drafting committee; published in 1979, this version of the Psalms became a standard. Poet and critic Major Jackson has said of Johnson’s volume of selected shorter poems: “Undoubtedly, this is a work headed for literary permanence”. Poet and critic Lawrence Joseph said of Johnson’s selected longer poems: “The scope of Now And Then is epic. It provides its readers with the same amplitude of intelligence, passion and formal achievement as our great American epics – Melville’s Moby Dick, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Ginsberg’s Fall of America”.
His poem about the iconic St. Paul’s Chapel, relief center for the recovery workers at Ground Zero in New York City, has been the Chapel’s memento card since soon after the 9/11 terrorists’ attacks (1.5 million cards distributed). American Book Review said of the poem in 2017: “Johnson’s ‘St. Paul’s Chapel’ is one of the most widely distributed, lauded, and translated poems of the current century”. One of fifteen writers selected to be showcased for the inaugural Harvard Alumni Authors’ Book Fair in 2019, he was educated at Harvard College and the University of Arkansas (Distinguished Alumnus Award, 2010).
