My Body is an Ill-Fitting Costume Chapbook

About My Body is an Ill-fitting Costume:

Rachael’s elegant, devastating poetry confronts, head-on, many forms of trauma, including ancestral trauma, child abuse, racism, (in)justice, ongoing colonization, and sexual assault, through vivid, visceral depictions of the body, personhood, motherhood, and the natural and animal worlds. Trauma, dissociation, and fracturing of the self shapes her intimate photography. The photos speak in conversation with the poems, rendering post-traumatic stress, chronic illnesses, and sensual, harsh realities through stark colors and contrast. Layered metaphors of fire, bone, time, pain, metal, water, and (dis)embodiment sustain the arc throughout the book, such as “I beat myself against a stone to strike a spark, but his hands crumbled into fists, grappled, flung me to the linoleum floor. I was mute coal giving off residual heat.” Rachael’s poetry resonates at the soul-level, and delves into distortions of time, where the pasts are always present. 

Bio:

Rachael Johnson is an indigenous, androgynous-gender-fluid, disabled Diné writer/poet from the Navajo Nation. She belongs to Táchii’nii, the Red Running into the Water people, and is born for Kinyaa’áanii, the Towering House clan. Her prose and poetry have been published in The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, Anti-Heroin Chic, Wordgathering, Writers Resist, Poetry Northwest, and Prairie Schooner. Her essay, “Nowhere Place,” won Prairie Schooner's 2017 Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest, a Glenna Luschei Award, and was recognized as a 2018 Notable Essay by Best American Essays. The Diné Reader: an Anthology of Navajo Literature, in which her poems were published, received a 2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. She is a kajukenbo mixed martial arts student. She is currently writing a memoir and a novel.