Songs Ysame

Songs Ysame gathers poems written in the dying light of the nineteenth century, when the world still moved slow enough for people to notice the shapes of clouds and the way morning sounds layered through an open window. Annie F. Johnston writes from that tender threshold between childhood and memory, when the past already feels distant even as we're still living it. Her verses move between the city and the countryside, between tenement windows overlooking brick and the old stone church where certain Sundays still echo in the mind. There is no grand ambition here, no modernist fracture: only the quiet work of catching beauty before it passes, of naming the small griefs and gentler joys that make up a life. These are poems for reading on a late afternoon when light turns golden and you find yourself remembering something you thought you'd forgotten. They ask nothing more than to be held in the hand, opened, and let to speak.