Amazon.com description: Product Description: While the Kettle's On, published by Little Balkans Press, is Melissa Fite Johnson's first book of poetry. 

"While the Kettle's On openly, whimsically and originally explores homecoming, whirling its journey through past generations, the present body, making home, unmaking the self, and everyday love. This strong first collection lands on what is, and what is behind what is, from the tree in the present that will one day be gone, to the grandmother once young, choosing "this future, this little life." Melissa Fite Johnson helps us see the large world encapsulated in the gestures and glances of even the smallest moments of this little or big life, including what losses damage even fresh air and what graces give us back all we are. In essence, the whole collection is about love, and how to recognize it when it shines through the moments that matter."
~ Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate
 
"Reading While the Kettle's On, one feels invited into Melissa Fite Johnson's family. Like a good novel, Johnson's poems bring us into her world, and readers come to know her the way we know a close relative or good friend: sharing times of joy and loss, sharing life-changing events (deaths, romance, and marriage) and the small day-to-day details (a garden of hydrangeas or eating hot dogs at a baseball game) that make our lives most truly our own. Each poem is well-crafted and enjoyable on its own, but the true pleasure is in the way the book as a whole draws us vividly into a community of family and friends and, most of all, into the mind of a poet who reveals a full range of human emotion, from happiness to sorrow and from nagging self-doubt to quiet confidence."
~ Dr. Christopher Todd Anderson, 2013-2014 Guest Poetry Editor for The Midwest Quarterly
 
"I have been reading Melissa's poetry--one poem every other Sunday--for more than a decade now, with pleasure, and with admiration for her dedication, artistry, and skill. I suspect she is her own toughest critic, and that is how it should be. She's good: her word choices are good, her lines lean, no lardy modifiers. She's a poet. I'm glad to have her as a friend."
~ Roland Sodowsky, author of AWP Award Winner Things We Lose
 
"Settle back with these poems and get as comfortable as you would on the living room sofa remembering your way through a family photo album. In Melissa Fite Johnson's While the Kettle's On, we're lucky to watch these four generations fall in love, take their chances, sip tap water from Mason jars, and lovingly polish their teaspoon collections. These poems are comfortable as an evening walk with the dog, often as soothing as a nightly ritual of washing dishes in lavender suds while the chickadee chirps on the pear branch outside the window. Take a minute while the tea steeps, scooch back into your favorite reading chair, and then sip from your steaming cup as you read these charming lyrics and personal yet universal stories."
~ From the book's introduction by Laura Lee Washburn, author of This Good Warm Place and Watching the Contortionists