Gifts of Participation is the 11th chapbook of powms by K. Carlton Johnson. Many of the poems have been published in other places. This collection of poems is analogus to the quotation from Czeslaw Milosz, that leads the book out for readers. " People near me don't know how difficult it is to pretend that nothing happened, that everything is normal". The collection tries to recover the gifts of participation in our lives. We love and have garage sales, cross rivers, in short witness to the life we have lived trying to make some kind of sense of the fleeting image of time and the longing that love leaves in its wake. Published by Rockland House Press, 2008, Calumet Michigan, 49913.