The Vast Kingdom of Nowhere by Kris Johnson

The Vast Kingdom of Nowhere by Kris Johnson

The Vast Kingdom of Nowhere is a narrative prose poem sequence that journeys into the life of a young American woman in an isolated army camp on Salisbury Plain. As her husband prepares for deployment to Afghanistan, she finds herself increasingly ill at ease in her marriage and her relationship to the military. Her disquiet is mirrored in the landscape she finds herself in. Wiltshire’s pastoral surroundings conceal their function as the training ground for war. She spends her days in a bucolic idyll permeated with threat: tanks, firing ranges, unexploded bombs, and the dead. The poems meditate on ecology and displacement, gender and otherness, and question what it means to occupy foreign territory. Examining the imprint of the military on the landscape and those who inhabit it, The Vast Kingdom of Nowhere offers an unconventional portrait of a military wife and of domestic life set against the backdrop of war. It follows Kris Johnson’s highly praised debut collection, Ghost River, which was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize and longlisted for the Laurel Prize.

The Vast Kingdom of Nowhere is electrifying in its sense of displacement and anxiety, in its scrutiny of the army as an institution from ground level, and in its evocation of waiting, landscape and solitude

Kris Johnson is from America’s Washington state but has lived in the UK since 2007. She received her MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University where she has also taught and worked as a researcher. In 2019, she was awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England. Her debut pamphlet, Skinny Dip, was published in 2022 by Enchiridion. Her first book-length collection, Ghost River, was published by Bloodaxe in 2023. It was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023 and shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2025. Her second poetry book, The Vast Kingdom of Nowhere, is published by Bloodaxe in 2027.