Wayne johns

ANTIPSALM
*Editor’s Choice in Unicorn Press’ First Book Series
*2019 Brockman-Campbell Award, Honorable Mention (for best book of poems by a North Carolina writer)

Hardcover, $25 / Special Edition $35
Purchase: Unicorn Press

Paperback: $18
Purchase: Unicorn Press / Small Press Distribution / Amazon

“Spooky, devastating, and ultimately tragic, Wayne Johns’ Antipsalm is as real a love story as you’re going to find. Its sinuous weave of story and song lures the reader to resurrect the fragments of a buried past: the object here is to rifle through drawers, study their remnant coins and photographs, leaf through old papers, and uncover, ultimately, the face of the beloved. I am so haunted by the beauty of these poems, my hair stands on end: Antipsalm pulls the ghosts from out the walls.” 
—CATE MARVIN, author of Oracle 

“I‘m not sure if Wayne Johns is a master of or a slave to the elegiac mode. I do know that the poems in Antipsalm are religiously devoted to their search for proof that romantic love amounts to more than longing and that death isn’t the only possible end to such longing. Much has been said about the spiritual impulse in poetry, but Johns adds a fresh voice to that long tradition, and that voice sings with a singular resonance. What a brilliantly well-crafted and heartbreaking debut!” 
—JERICHO BROWN, author of The Tradition