DIARY OF A STRING

Poetry. Spiral Editions, 2024. Paperback, 82 pages. 6" x 9"

From NMB: Once we latched onto Johnson’s swerving, purposefully-akimbo writing style, we laughed throughout this book. It’s like getting to know someone and suddenly realizing how funny they are. The speaker (is it the poor, knocked-about, overworked String of the title?) is half human-punchline, half human-punching-bag. Each poem is made of short, numbered sections that build on each other, creating worlds of broken wisdom and faux-didactic writing—memes from the 17th century. Like a funny, heartbreaking show that only ran for one season, Diary of a String kept us returning to its world. This is a great one for readers interested in experimental, absurdist, or glitchy writing.

From the press: In Diary of a String, Johnson offers the reader yet another beautifully psychedelic, at times hilarious, at times gut-wrenchingly sad snapshot of this (his) constantly expanding and accreting universe. We amble through a flotsam of compacted late capital stratae of trash, universes of foreclosed possibilities, weird vegetables, persons and things assembled in the fucked desklight of gig economy "free time," genealogies of items, worlds, and characters defined by mishap and obscurity. All of this and more, etc., as the salesman would refrain--presented with a diction, syntax, and narrative architecture that all at once seems to ooze and move with generosity, possibility, and mutable unselfishness while exacting a sharp, crystalline method of meaning and representation. Everything is possible here, even beyond the horizon of the given story, even as the horizon of the story doubles and fractals recursively past the limits of what we hold to be true as story, as horizon, as possibility. "The /spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer," and we should all be so lucky that Johnson is able to record some of it for us to sample.