The King of Terrors

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Graceful, sculpted poems that investigate mortality and look for answers in love, friendship, and art.Written after Jim Johnstone was diagnosed with a brain tumor early in the pandemic, The King of Terrors is an address to the author’s Future Ghost. Haunted by the evolving North American landscape and the anxiety of living in a dysfunctional society, these poems ask: Are we doomed to repeat the decisions that have brought us to the point of collapse? Is there a way to affect nature in a positive way and save ourselves in the process? Can love be a starting point in a quest for change? The haunting that takes place in The King of Terrors is corporeal – a bodily fear that manifests in poems about the pandemic, living with illness, and a series of love poems for his wife."There is a moving, fierce intensity to The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone knowingly reminds us that betrayals of the body are also betrayals of language, ‘each bloody / mouthful a sentence fragment.’ These are lines of admission, ambition, and harrowing truth, and Johnstone – despite a future only as certain ‘as the body // it inhabits’ – offers a form of redemption, for the fortitude of the sick, for poetry itself." – Randall Mann “Infinity Network is a spare, sculpted, and devastating collection that fearlessly explores the outermost range, reverb, and implications of identity politics and techtopia as pale substitutes for human vitality and interdependency. “ Virginia Konchan, On the Seawall on Infinity Network “Dog Ear poses personal impressions and collective questions - what we leave behind, if anything, in the physical world - by cultivating images and semi-narratives that are deeply, and sometimes, ridiculously human. In doing so, Johnstone's poems confidently confront love, death, and spectacle.” – Brick: A Literary Journal on Dog Ear “Johnstone’s poems realize that 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky' was permeated with 'Nothing to do, nowhere to go, / I wanna be sedated' from its very origin and, by now, has given way to it entirely.” A. F. Moritz, Hamilton Arts & Letters on The Chemical Life