“Reading The Color of Truth, I felt as though I’d had a long conversation with a good friend, one who loves creatures and growing things, thinks deeply about the big questions in life, and observes the world with a loving if sometimes puzzled eye. Johnson is a fine poet with a varied range, and I admire her agility with language and imagery and the sweep of subjects from contemporary to historical. These poems are both down-to-earth and lyrical, and her references to Biblical stories and favorite literary touchstones present us with ways of knowing and–sometimes more importantly–ways of asking why we die and how we should live. If color serves as a metaphor for the range of truths we might encounter in our questioning, this book is a rainbow.”
-Jennifer Horne, Poet Laureate of Alabama (2017-2021)

“Laura Anella Johnson’s second collection is a masterful demonstration of poetic skill and voice. These are poems of spiritual doubt, but also of spiritual affirmation. Her poems admit “that tucked behind [her] stained-glass faith, dark spaces lurk…”  yet also celebrate “that moment [He] whispers assurance of nothing but Love, and [her] stormy waves fall slack.” This is a moving and personal book, including poems of packing up a dying colleague’s desk, of dead or dying animals, and of heartache in a red sweater. Brilliantly executed, beautifully formed, Johnson’s second collection is a worthy successor to her debut, Not Yet, and a dazzling display of many colors, some seen, some not.”
–Steven Shields, author of Creation Story 

In her new collection The Color of Truth, Laura Anella Johnson highlights the ordinary moments of life, and also the ordinariness of life’s more unusual moments, like that time a deer attacked the dog. Johnson uses differences in perspective, and in dreams versus reality, to ask what is truth. The book can be summed up with a phrase from her poem Grey Weight: “that sky-blue pickup that rumbles again / and again on the gravel drive of memory.” Johnson herself is driving that truck. Pile in the back, y’all.
— Danielle Hanson, Author of Fraying Edge of Sky