Nuper Verba

"If, as it has been claimed, the satirist is a left-handed writer, the analogy seems made for Kent Johnson's inimitable, fearless and much needed contribution - the one-in-ten, or more like one-in-a-thousand corrective, antidote, ballast, counterpoint, to the worst excesses and insincerities of western poetry's decadence and pomposity. In Nuper Verba - the Latin title is apposite - he takes aim at poetry's postures of antagonism, even as it drains the last best wine and lounges on a mouldering couch of bursaries. Truth-sayer or holy fool, insider's outsider or witnessing spirit, the moral force of Johnson's project, as well as its sublime humour, shines like so many corroding rays, here reaching moments of unanticipated lyrical brightness. He's never been funnier or more strangely moving. Refusing consensus and mentioning the unmentionable remains the true poet's calling, and Johnson's poetry reminds us of this, with the beautiful sobering chill of genuine veracity." -Sam Riviere "The writings of Kent Johnson over the years have given us an outsized sense of disquiet and mockery, as he revives and transforms the ancient art of satire, bringing it laughing and raging into a new century and millennium. The great pleasure in Nuper Verba is, then, the comic fury he gives to poems that aim at the literary present, while aware of a range of poets and literary pretenders from ancient Rome to contemporary USAmerica and elsewhere. The words and thoughts that Johnson gives to Horace in "translation" are directed simultaneously and sometimes outrageously to the poets and poetry wars of our time. An adjustment well worth making." -Jerome Rothenberg "Read super-duper Kent Johnson's Nuper Verba for its heroic troubles and foibles, its fabulist fables. Or for the pleasure of its deft ear. Or because it's hard to tell its lies from truths, which is unnerving - poetry doing its job. Read Nuper Verba for its fury tempered by love, its gloom by wit, its grief by mirth, its erudite suavity by a vulnerability both shy and sly. Read it for its crudeness tempered by the delicacy of a seven-foot moose outside Perry's Nut House, and for its wickedness, tenderness, beauty without warning." - Billie Chernicoff "Read super-duper Kent Johnson's Nuper Verba for its heroic troubles and foibles, its fabulist fables. Or...