Luke Johnson 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 LaureateQuiver 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.
Quiver is a book of reckoning and ghosts. It deals with both lineal fracture and fatherlessness, and is a visceral guide through boyhood into fatherhood.