To Make the World a Better Place

This is a devotional, meditative collection written by an older poet reflecting on mortality, faith, creativity, and civic conscience — and its greatest strength is the sincerity and moral seriousness with which it takes on its themes. This isn't marketed to children despite the illustrated-book framing note; it reads as an adult inspirational/spiritual poetry collection, closer to a personal hymnal than a picture book, so I've judged it as such.

The strongest material comes when Johnsen turns from abstraction toward the concrete and political. "Agnus Dei" is the collection's high point — the sacrificial-lamb imagery fused with the DEI acronym is a genuinely striking conceit, and lines like "Somewhere / Within this lamb / Of sacrifice / Lies the / beating heart / Of this nation, / On life support" earn their weight because the poem risks a real argument rather than settling for comfort. "Monday, January 26, 2026" and "A Better Way?" continue this vein — direct, angry, dated poems responding to specific news events, which give the book an unusual immediacy and moral urgency for a collection otherwise given to soft-focus gratitude and nature imagery.

The gentler poems ("Presents," "The Deep Pool," "A Slow Waltz") show real attentiveness to small sensory detail — the "high-pitched electrical hum," the "lingering taste on the tongue" of coffee — and the tercet exercise shows a poet consciously working craft. The book knows its reader: someone seeking comfort, reflection, and moral company in later life, and it delivers that honestly, without cynicism.