Jeffrey Johannes's tender chapbook, Coffee Quiet, resonates with the meditative moments of morning fog and sunlight rising beyond the brim of his china cup in spare poems that evoke what he sees in those hours: birth, death, love, loss. Johannes brings an artist's eye and a poet's empathy and metaphor: a Luna moth sleeping like an oriental kite or a white deer glowing in moonlight; the moment when bystanders herd tiny turtles loosed from a market stall; a wish for the sun to warm Earth's "millions of wounded miles." These are poems to read and reread in your own quiet and gratitude.
-Robin Chapman, poet and author of Six True Things, The Only Home We Know, and Panic Season
Anyone on the lookout for a stunning collection of poems that offer insights, affectionate glimpses of nature, plenty of high spirits, and a side order of tart wit - needs to search no further: Jeffrey Johannes's skillfully crafted new chapbook, Coffee Quiet, is your book. Its wry humor is clearly demonstrated in a poem straightforwardly titled "Go to Our Rooms," in which we all are cheerfully ordered to do just that "while Earth / sighs with relief." Others in the collection are far more reflective and thoughtful, however, and filled with a poet's sense of genuine wonder. You will be left with the firm conviction that "acts of kindness / appear like moths / circling our porch lights / drawn to the light." Of course they do!
-Marilyn L. Taylor, former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin and winner of the Margaret Reid Award for verse in forms
Cinematographers call it the golden hour, a period of day just before sunset and shortly after sunrise when the light turns soft and the world glows serene. Jeffrey Johannes's poems evoke this time, one of warmth and awe. Phrase by exquisite phrase, each poem in this collection elicits wonder. In "The Beauty of Physics," he writes of "the ephemeral beige/of cedar waxwings flying." In "Accept the Miracles," he conjures images in words of "those among/ the faithful who have seen the face of Allah in an open avocado." Jeffrey's poems gather the burnished light that bridges night and day and transforms it into sacrament, a sacrament called Coffee Quiet.
-John Bloner, Jr., Editor/Publisher, Moss Piglet
