How to Survive
Introducing TSB’s Poet Laureate series.
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Those of you who read The Small Bow newsletter regularly know that poetry has been an important part of my recovery. Every morning, I read a poem as part of my daily journal and reading routine. This began in 2017, when I was working my way through early sobriety. I discovered a poem that I loved — Stephen Dunn’s “The Inheritance.” From there, I began to seek out more contemporary stuff, poems that I read for pure enjoyment. Poems that offered me recognizable worlds and helped me access some of the disorienting feelings I was navigating in early sobriety.
In order to better promote poetry and the poets who write it on TSB, I’m starting a monthly series called “TSB’s Poet Laureate Club” where I’ll feature one poet per month whose work I dig and have found an excellent complement to my recovery.
First up is Molly Johnsen. A quick note about Molly — she was involved in the same horrible accident that appeared in a TSB essay we published back in 2021. “Hit by a Truck” was written by her cousin Emma Carmichael, who was also critically injured with her that night. Molly’s debut collection of poetry, Everything Alive (Green Writers Press, October 2025), is now available for preorder.
“You Have to Do This”
by Molly Johnsen
*****
After I was plowed into by an F450 and almost bled out on a bridge, I started writing poetry. I’ve always been a writer, but it was all nonfiction prose before that. It’s become clear, as my poetry collection crystallized, that I processed my trauma through metaphor and juxtaposition. I made sense of one thing in relation to another. Poetry helped me tame the wild beast of near-death and try to answer the question, “What the hell just happened?”
It was my time in Natalie Shapero’s Kenyon Review Writers Workshop that convinced me I had a project to complete. More accurately, it was Natalie Shapero, who took me aside at the end of the week and told me I had to write a book. After months of dealing with doctors looking at me and shrugging — about whether I’d be able to get pregnant, about the weird lesion that emerged on my thigh, about why I developed epilepsy months after the injury — it felt so stark and urgent to be told,
“You have to do this.”
The book took ten years. I left my job less than a year after Natalie’s workshop and pursued an M.F.A.
It was there, in the bleakness of Syracuse, that I realized what was going to happen if I actually Got Down to It. Poems about physical trauma led to many about mental health. Meditations on my neuroses brought forth a need to go back to my childhood home, before my parents’ divorce, to both parse the past and reimagine it.
As I revised and began new work, I started realizing the ways I was hoping to create not just a collection of poems, but an incantation. “Miraculously” surviving an accident did not turn me into a better person. It didn’t make me grateful for every day. Instead, it made me fearful. What if it all dies?
It’s the same way sobriety didn’t bring me enlightenment — mostly better skin and nightly dreams of long benders. My writing is a search for solace. An unfortunate spoiler is that I haven’t found it.
My poem, “what we share,” demonstrates most clearly my attempt to make sense of capital-T Trauma. The word was thrown around so much in the months after the accident that it lost whatever nebulous meaning it had. Post-traumatic stress, trauma to the pelvic area, traumatic episode. The poem may read like a desire to understand the concept of trauma while also uniting every person in the world. But really, I just want to settle my own mind.
what we share
or what if trauma is like sourdough
starter? We all have a mother. Wild
yeast can be finicky as memory,
adapting to the climate it finds
itself in: San Francisco, Denver,
Connecticut, me. Passed around
between bodies, not mason jars,
but—like a good loaf—we’re hardened
and split. Feed a starter regularly
with flour and water and it remains
active. We eat each other’s
beginnings. Your self-dealing dad
becomes my seizure in the street, your
drug addiction my fear of black
cars. Half the blood in my body
comes from other people. My cousin
tried to smuggle his starter into Spain—
only wanted to eat his own in his bread.
Molly Johnsen is a Vermont-based writer and teacher. Her work has appeared in the Nashville Review, Indiana Review, Cider Press Review, and others. Her debut collection of poetry, Everything Alive (Green Writers Press, October 2025), is now available for preorder. Molly holds an MFA from Syracuse University.
Related:
I urge you to read Kaveh Akbar's "Martyr!" if you haven't already. The reasons why will speak for themselves.
Interesting stuff. I’m mildly surprised. As a Vermonter and VT poetry snghologist, that I don’t know Molly… but VT has nore poets per capita than any state (he proudly reports).