Title: You Left Your Heart
Author: Johanna Aitchison
Pocket Book No 6

The poems are like small children,
waiting to be born in your snot.

Sample Text

You dream of women in FACE COVERS, attacking you with salad servers. You dream of walking into the forest with a shovel and digging for something someone told you was buried years ago. Perhaps the clean skull of a goat. Perhaps a moon’s fingernail. Perhaps a diary sealed in a zip-lock bag. You pull it out of the hole. You brush away the dirt. Open it!

About the Author

Johanna works as a high school English teacher in the Manawatū. Some of these poems were written as part of her PhD in Creative Writing from Massey University, New Zealand.

She was the 2019 Mark Strand Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee, a fellow at the Fall Residency of the International Writers’ Program at the University of Iowa in 2015, and the Visiting Artist at Massey University, Palmerston North in 2012.  Johanna was the winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society International Competition (2010) and the Victoria University Story Inc. Prize for Poetry (2005), and a finalist in the 2008 Montana New Zealand National Book Awards .

Thanks are also due to the editors of the publications where these poems have appeared: The Hopkins Review, Best Small Fictions, Takahē, Turbine, Sport, and Rabbit.

You can find out more about Johanna Aitchison’s work at johannaaitchison.com.