Quiver: Poems"Luke Johnson cements his title as the uncontested master of shadow... Quiver will change the way you see." --Patricia Smith, author of Unshuttered: Poems "Quiver is a rare creation full of song and scar, authenticity and Old Testament mythology, of emotional complexity and witness." --John Sibley Williams, Scale Model of a Country at Dawn "The poems [in Quiver] are singing when they are stinging, scalding as they serve up something wildly fresh, slap after exquisite slap." --Elaine Sexton, author of Drive "...a work of glorious complexity." --Ellen Bass "...the most visceral, haunting book of poems I have read in years." --Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate Quiver is a book of reckoning, a book of ghosts, a book of lineal fracture and generational fatherlesness. It's a visceral guide through boyhood into fatherhood. One that yields witness to trauma, erotic shames, brutalities and toxic masculinity, and in so doing, emerges with a speaker beginning to free himself. Patricia Smith said it best: "Quiver will change the way you see." ... "floodghost" Mother couldn't manage what sated me, so she prayed: sought in silence a substance that'd soothe, something familial with grace. I groaned. Broke bodies over blacktop's pane, a bottom- less well of blood. At seven I smothered a frog and fed each leg to my quivering sister laughed while she choked out its skin. At twelve, I pulled a pistol from under the vacant shed and shoved its shudder to a schoolboy's temple, teased while he wept in his piss. And yet all along a Psalm, a satchel of prayer: song. Mother making contracts with the sky, while I tore its pages to light a fire, warm my hands around it. Radiant blue. Red from a faraway pine. |
