The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly

by Denis Johnson

From the award-winning poet and novelist—a must-have collection of his four previous books of poetry plus a selection of new, unpublished work.

Genres: Poetry, Literature

225 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer's Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently, the National Book Award for Fiction (2007).

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The towels rot and disgust me on this damp
peninsula where they invented mist
and drug abuse and taught the light to fade,
where my top-quality rock-bottom heart
cries because I'll never get to kiss
your famous knees again in a room made
vague by throwing a scarf over a lamp.
Things get pretty radical in the dark:
the sailboats on the inlet sail away;
the provinces of actuality
crawl on the sea; the dusk now tenderly
ministers to the fallen parking lots—
the sunset instantaneous on the fenders,
memory and peace . . . the grip of chaos . . .

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 1995 gathering of Denis Johnson’s four published books of poetry, from 1969 to 1987, plus about 20 pages of then new poems.

A little back story: My wife and I have very different literary tastes. When we moved in together and intermingled our books there was hardly any overlap; a Faulkner or two, maybe a Henry James, an anomalous Italo Calvino. She also had a small collection of poetry (Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, Anne Sexton), as opposed to my quite large collection of more experimental stuff, and these books of hers I was particular reluctant to merge with mine. Some I actually consigned to the basement, others I put in stacks down on the floor beside my poetry shelf, to collect dust and fur balls. This Denis Johnson collection was one of those. I would occasionally dip into it, because I liked some of his novels so much, but every time I would come away actually kind of angry; the poems just seemed so slipshod and random in their construction, prose chopped up into “poetry” nuggets. This book actually filled me with a mild disgust. I have a benign mania about covering all my hardcovers with protective plastic, but I refused to give to this that TLC, even if it was a first edition. Screw it!

Then a little while ago Mike Emmons here on GR rated DJ's poetry, which inspired me to pick this book up off the floor, and with a clear unprejudiced mind I began to read. I found my old cringes and spleen spurts surface immediately while reading The Man Among the Seals, his first collection, but I soldiered on, partly because they were so easy to read that they allowed me to think of other things. One or two struck me as effective in a Naked Poetry workshoppy way, but blah and tepid cringe for the most part. Inner Weather raised the stakes slightly. At least he did away with the lower case “i” deployed in his first book, but still kind of not too interesting; good stories but slack language. So I skipped quite a few poems to get to The Incognito Lounge…

Denis Johnson must have been visited by a Poetry Angel while writing this. It is almost eerie how much better this book is than those that preceded it. There is a new world dawning in the verbal risks he takes, straining sense to find pure poetry. I know very little about his life, but maybe he was doing just enough drugs at this point, and had developed just enough literary chops, that he was able to merge the wild man with compassionate X-ray eyes with the belle-lettrist at the height of his powers.

After these heights there’s another falling off, a slackening, with his next volume, The Veil, and also the new poems. But to his credit through all of his books there is tremendous insight and feeling and compassion, and within his chosen milieu of the down-and-outers, vagrants, drug takers, and seedy survival there is a welcome absence of himself, a total lack of self-absorption, like Bukowski, say (though I'm not knocking Buk). Many of the poems are first person, but often a persona is employed, even as one knows he’s writing from first-hand experience. He remains for the most part behind-the-scenes, which adds a mystery and power to his work. He's there, he's living that life, but he's given himself over to the recording angel. Through reading this I learned very little about Denis Johnson the personality, but I have learned much about his profound and shadowy emotional involvement with people and things, his far-ranging sensibility (from gutter to glory), and his all-enveloping disembodied compassion. He had a good run when he was good.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm starting a project to (re-)read all of Johnson's poetry, short stories and novels in publication order (I have read a lot of them already but will pick up the missing ones as I work through).

This book contains all Johnson's poetry, bringing together 4 different volumes plus some additional new poems. The first three collections were the first three things Johnson published, so I will read those before moving onto a novel and then coming back to this. Then a few more novels and then back to this. So, this review will take a long time to complete.

The Man Among The Seals
This was originally published in 1969 when Johnson was just 19 years of age. As with "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" which I read recently and which was published when McCullers was just 23, it is hard to believe that Johnson was so young when he wrote these poems.

I have to acknowledge that I am not a good poetry reader. I hardly ever (never, really) read poetry which means I have little experience and sometimes struggle. What I did here was read all the poems 2-3 times including once out loud. What is immediately clear is what I have known for a long time from reading Johnson's novels: he has a feeling for words and he uses them in ways that I respond to even in his poetry where I might not completely understand what he is doing. Read out loud, the poems feel very satisfying even though most of them are a bit down beat (the back of the book describes them as poems of grief and regret, of nightmare and acceptance, of redemption and the possibility of grace.).

I guess it's early days to comment further. I get the impression this is Johnson getting a feel for how he wants words to sound when he writes. Knowing what I already know about his novels, I imagine the poetry collections will become more sophisticated as they progress. But this is a great start and at least I can now say I have read a bit of poetry!

Inner Weather
We skip from 1969 to 1976. And the poetry also seems to grow up. Although, as noted above, I am hardly one to comment. But, to me at least, this very short collection felt more "poetic" - richer in imagery and, possibly, more obscured meanings. I'd like to re-read this collection (and may well do that before moving onto what most people seem to consider the peak of Johnson's poetry, The Incognito Lounge).

The Incognito Lounge
Woah! What just happened there? We've skipped to 1982 and Johnson's poetry has skipped several levels to land somewhere much, much higher. Even I, with my limited poetry reading experience, can understand why this collection won a prize. I wouldn't claim that I "understood" all the poems, but I was captivated by many of them. Perhaps I'll include one here to give you a sample:

Sway

Since I find you will no longer love,
from bar to bar in terror I shall move
past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth
and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,
their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,
suffer the light from the wrestling arena
to fall all over them. And what they say
blends in the tarantellasmic sway
of all of us between the two of these:
harmony and divergence,
their sad story of harmony and divergence,
the story that begins
I did not know who she was
and ends I did not know who she was.

I really liked this short collection.

The Veil
I'm trying to read Johnson's work in publication order but a review I have just seen of this collection suggests I got it slightly wrong and should have read "The Stars at Noon" first (same year - that's what fooled me).

Anyway, it feels like a large part of this collection can be captured with the phrase "the terror/ of being just one person, one chance, one set of days". I'm not sure I understood all these poems, but then I'm not sure understanding is the point. They are raw and, in reference to the the collection's title, it feels a bit like a veil has been torn away and that has exposed you to something that can't really be put into words, or, at least, not words that you can rationalise and explain.

This is a collection to re-visit. I think it would be worth reading the poems aloud and then sitting with them for a while. That said, it doesn't feel like it has the power of The Incognito Lounge.

New Poems
If working strictly to chronological order, I should have delayed this final section until after Jesus' Son, but it's so short and there is so little of the book still in your right hand when you finish The Veil that the temptation to just read on is too great and I did that. And I feel that it is a bit a weak ending to a collection that started well, got better until it peaked at The Incognito Lounge and then gradually tailed off.

Overall, 3.5 stars but rounded up because of that central collection. Several bits of this book I would like to re-visit and take more time over, so that must be a positive.

[Jayden McComiskie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Denis Johnson is life.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

The latter poems are much more vivid.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

While in the creative writing seminars I wrote a letter to one of my teachers and said the Denis Johnson writes the way I wish I could write. My teacher was not impressed. I graduated anyway. He can kiss my literarily certified ass. This book is amazing.

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I struggle to think of many worthwhile contemporary American poets. Charles Simic is dull, Christian Wiman arrogant, and Donald Hall as enjoyable as Monday morning drizzle.

Denis Johnson is best known for his fiction, particularly the story collection Jesus' Son. I think his poetic bent finds better expression in the fiction. As with Bukowski, Johnson’s poems are largely formless sprawl, spurning capital letters, lines that scan, images that blaze, or stanzas that demand to be memorised. The later poems ramble too much and leak religious imagery over everything like soap from a fractured dispenser. Disappointing.

[Levi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson writes poetry like he’s speaking in tongues: it is strange and beautiful and sometimes affecting and if you’re earnest enough, it just might start to make sense, but also maybe it’s all just bullshit. This is why I love Denis.

[Nick Milinazzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We understand well that we must hold
our lives up in our arms like the victims
of solitary, terrible accidents,
that we must still hold our lives to their promises
and hold ourselves up to our lives
to be sure always they are larger,
wholer, realer than we ourselves, though we
must carry them."

"Music, you are light.
Agony, you are only what tips
me from moment to moment, light
to light and word to word,
and I am here at the waters
because in this space between spaces
where nothing speaks,
I am what it says."

"Stove
at my back, warm me.
Rain on the harbor, tell me.
Dark on the day, know me.
Dark on the day, see me.
Dark on the day, help me."

This collection spans the entirety of Johnson's career, but he wasn't just a poet: he was also a writer of novels, short stories, and essays. He struggled during his twenties with drug and alcohol abuse, and you can see the evidence of that in his early work. It is often self-referential as well as social commentary. He uses his poetry to work through his own problems, to expose himself (that is evident in the examples above). He speaks about the common and mundane, but also the derelict, vagrants and vagabonds, as he could still see himself as one of them. The pieces become more surreal and heavily metaphoric the older he gets, but they all carry a weight and severity to them. An effective and affecting collection from a talented author (whom we lost too soon).

[Ryan Berger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a poor arbiter for poetry. I am still young in my journey and can only think about it in the same way I think about paintings. All I have is the feeling most of the time, what it inspires in me.

When I read Johnson's poetry, I feel something more honest and substantive in the sleezy despair that Charles Bukowski made a home in, and I feel those familiar rhythms of the beat poets. I feel repeated religious epiphanies in Johnson's descriptions of falling snow, step children and alcoholics.

So again, not an expert here-- but this feels like an especially unorthodox style. Far be it for me to use "enjambment" without consulting three google searches and a youtube video before I feel like I have a good grip on it-- but the way Johnson breaks up his lines feels incomprehensible and yet laden with meaning. This is one of those things that I just don't have the current facilities to really say much enlightening about it.

All I know is that I love it.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew Denis Johnson for his short stories. Without hyperbole, they towered over all other short stories I've read. So the worst that could happen is his poetry is just prosaic, just lineated short stories. Right?

Unfortunately not. Throughout this career-spanning book, Johnson gropes in the dark at what he thinks poetry is. Early on, that means no capital letters, lots of heavy enjambment, but only the last word of the line. For example:

the dry dry land. here
and there from the
rasp and muscle of its flatness
a tree gushes forth. i

have seen trees, have
heard them at night being
dragged into the sky.
i know that they are very
real. i know they know.

The first stanza has not one but two of those "period before the last word of the line and that word starts a new sentence." At times this works very well, but after two collections of poetry it wears thin. Denis detects this, and shifts his approach. The sudden improvement stunned me. According to wikipedia, he quit drinking around this time, but hadn't yet stopped using drugs. The poetry clearly reads as various states of mind. The drunken stupor of the first two poetry collections in the book don't allow him to even capitalize, constantly spilling over one line into the next. The main momentum in these earlier poems is that of falling over, falling off the barstool, retching on the sidewalk outside the bar he was just thrown out of. It's pitiable to watch, and even at times darkly beautiful. Johnson's early, largely self-imposed frustrations transmute through his swimming drunken gaze into distant and muffled voices. He watches violence happen without passion or reaction, observing and reporting like a journalist, or rather a meta-journalist, savagely critiquing the indifference of others, of the universe. Perhaps he was raised by television to expect such gore, and thus it doesn't surprise him. The line between intrusive thoughts and daily life blurs like the traffic lights as he drives drunkenly home. He complains of lacking even outrage, any fully-experienced emotion with which to speak.

If the soft falling away of the afternoon
is all there is, it is nearly
enough

Night and weather, and especially night-weather feature frequently, complicating his already-adled observations. Distant events conspire around the city to form a constellation of dissipation, a mirror of his own self-loathing and dissatisfaction.

But suddenly, like the flicking on of ceiling lights, or the loud whir of raised blinds, his third collection hits you. "The Incognito Lounge." Aptly titled for our contemporary age, Johnson wakes up, dream-residue still clinging to his tongue, his fingertips, his hair. He spews Plath, Mayakovsky, Neruda, confusedly, but also so convincingly that you can't disagree. Bookended by two long, absolutely devastating poems, he rips colors out by the roots and squeezes them for juice.

She pours me some boiled
coffee that tastes like noise
...
And so on--nap, soup, window,
say a few words into the telephone,
smaller and smaller words.
...
right slam on the brink of language
...
The parking lot is full,
everyone having the same dream
of shopping and shopping
through an afternoon
that changes like a face.

I commend early Johnson for disregarding line lengths, playing with the line, trimming and pruning in his own hazy way, but I commend later Johnson for revolutionizing the imagery so that the lines disappear completely. Everything inanimate comes alive in these poems, the world pulsates, lunges at you, cries out in pain upon your touch. Synesthesia reigns unopposed, a merciful tyrant, so merciful he sets all the prisoners free, declares everyone and everything innocent. Anarchy washes over all like sunlight.

We part with a grief as cutting
as that line between water and air.
I go downstairs and I go
outside. It is like stepping into the wake
of a tactless remark, the city's stupid
chatter hurrying to cover up
the shocked lull. The moon's
mouth is moving, and I am just
leaning forward to listen
...
naming
those things it now seems
I might have done
to have prevented his miserable
life. I am desolate.
What is happening to me.

The randomness boils over at times, but mostly the accidental metaphors charm, they disarm suspicion and lock the suicide doors so you can't escape. And this car has no seatbelts. Some quieter moments slow down, but they often prove the top of a roller coaster, only the deception before the fall. Johnson is wrestling magnificently while writing these poems; he has broken free from alcohol, but not yet other drugs; he knows he has a problem, but much of his old, broken self impedes forward progress. Things veer sideways, and sometimes the backspin on the cue ball stops it just short of entering the pocket. A devastating story of trauma caps the Incognito (Mode) Lounge, and, if autobiographical, it's both illuminating and saddening.

But when he gets totally sober, things shatter. The hangover kicks in with a vengeance, and any clarity has sharpened into the broken end of a beer bottle, and he's holding it at his own throat. His poems wander in to art galleries, but they leer at the art with a skeptical, unempathetic eye, scoffing under his breath at not only the works, but the people who would dare create or, god forbid, view such works. His resentfulness shows its ugliest face toward women, unfortunately. His relationship with sex seemed to have been already complicated when in a stupor, but its squinting at the sun of sobriety makes him return to a dark den, away from anyone and everything. He blames his mother, he blames women, he blames everything but himself. His fascination with young women and girls unsettles the sensitive reader and makes him feel like a crusty old creep.

These poems bloat up, like a potbelleyed middle-aged man, with only one or two memorable lines per poem. Guns held to heads feature more frequently, and with less ironic distance than before. It seems that after someone flicked the lights on, he chose to roll over and cover his head with the sheets. The poetry remains largely shocking, but in a way which transformed from the shocking freshness of the jarring imagery of "Incognito" to an often-unintentionally jarring sexism and occasional racism. Only one poem from the last collection stands out: "The Honor;" of course it's a bitter poem, resentful even, but its sharpness remains carefully sheathed. Glances refract like light through drink glasses, and the absurdity of egotism gets attacked, not just women.

But it was nothing
to her, and in fact she didn't remember it.
I didn't know what else to talk about.
I looked around us at a room full of hands
moving drinks in tiny, rapid circles--
you know how people do
with their drinks.

Soon after this I became
another person, somebody
I would have brushed off if I'd met him that night,
somebody I never imagined.

The crowning fault of this last collection is titular. If you're not familiar with James Hampton's Throne, watch this video, it'll get you up to speed. This was easily the most disappointing poem in the entire book. Its diction is tedious, its tone of voice dismissive; it proves a wasted opportunity to reflect on religious outsider art, and instead Johnson merely insults Hampton as "probably insane" and "crazy." The cliched phrases around "going crazy" and "go[ing] out of your mind" abound, to the point that I was crossing out half the lines of the poem. It felt uncharacteristically lazy, and I was surprised that Johnson didn't see within Hampton any kindred spirit, any joint striving for mad religious fervor. For a guy who wrote a short story collection called "Jesus' Son," I'm shocked that he missed the boat this badly. I want to write something much better on the topic of Hampton's work, just to spite him.

By the very end of the book, we get not even 20 pages of new poems, a paltry showing of watered down, sometimes utterly unremarkable poems. A faint glow of the "Incognito" years shines behind various lines, but none of the poems connect fully; they all derail sooner or later. The sexuality remains uncomfortable, and lines return to their variable lengths of yore. But the damage has been done. Knowing this trajectory within Johnson's life and poetry, I want to revisit his short stories. I hope they hold up, but I fear I'll smell the bitterness hiding under the surface. If anything, this book serves as a via negativa, a guide for how not to write poetry, albeit with a bright light of inspiration cutting straight through the middle.

[Lucas Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to all of the New Yorker fiction podcasts featuring Denis Johnson stories over the past few months. It adds up to a pretty eclectic group of authors reading four of five (I think only four) stories of Johnson's collected in Jesus' Son. I bought a used copy of that collection sight unseen at Downtown Books and News in Asheville,NC in maybe 2006 or 2007. It has since become a touchstone of sorts. Most of Johnson's catalogue rises to the quality of these stories, but none of his other books have had quite the emotional impact as those, unbeknownst to me, influential, respected, and highly popular stories. But the New Yorker fiction podcast. Many of the authors reading Johnson's stories related their initial encounters with Johnson's writing through his three early collections of poems. As far as I can tell, his first published works.

I had this collection buried on an amazon wishlist for a couple of years, always a bit wary of it. A lot of the poetry I read I view as instructive, it fills in the gaps between schools, decades, continents. All footnotes to a constantly evolving mental history of poetry I have in the back of my mind. I should have never bought the David Perkin's history of modern poetry, but that's how my brain organizes the whole genre now. I like context. Especially in poems. Denis Johnson doesn't get a mention in the late eighties chapter, to my knowledge at least. I'm confident I haven't read that far, anyway.

The poems are great, there are many that just sort of wash by, but that is inevitable, i believe, in any omnibus. The compression that is such striking feature of Johnson's short stories is on full display in his poems. There are recurring themes, rain, waitresses, the shouts of disgruntled wives that socket into Johnson's Pacific Northwest loser, outsider context easily. The line breaks are tight in the first few collections, often just three or four words, short stanzas or a single column of ten to fifteen lines. Lines begin to meander as the collections collect. Eventually with multi-sectioned poems dealing with specific topics, usually works of art. This progression and growth felt natural, especially due to my relative quick reading of the collection from start to finish. The poems stand on there own, but viewed as a progression towards the style and substance of the stories in Jesus Son, the offer a unique portrait of an extremely gifted author finding his voice. I would recommend this to anyone, but would say it's near required reading for longtime fans of Denis Johnson.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm learning that everything this man writes is lonely. There is some crazy corniness in here, but there's also some great movement. Being stoned makes this feel a lot less melancholy. Try that, late at night. It's perfect then.

[chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

"i think i have killed an animal,
a barely visible bird,
at eight p.m., or the dim
figure of a woman bent over
her sewing, in a distant house,
who glanced occasionally
at the big moon. and i shot
a telephone pole as it strained
into the sky, wanting desperately the moon."
-- "Telling the Hour"

outside the towns the wide plains
are delirious
with frozen animals,
and the sky is rising with moons and moons.
these faces lifted over the street
are not moons. even so, they are
lost somewhere between worlds and home
in a town that can't quite hold onto the earth.
-- "A Child Is Born in the Midwest"

i inch toward death and i
must poke my body into a thousand vacant
darknesses before i strike the correct sleep, and dream.
-- "In a Rented Room"

One changes so much
from moment to moment
that when one hugs
oneself against the chill
air at the inception
of spring, at night,
knees drawn to chin,
he finds himself in the arms
of a total stranger,
the arms of one he might move
away from on the dark playground.
Also, it breaks the heart
that the sign revolving like
a flame above the gas
station remembers the price
of gas, but forgets entirely
this face it has been
looking at all day.
And so the heart is exhausted
that even in the face
of the dismal facts we wait
for the loves of the past
to come walking from the fire,
the tree, the stone, the tangible
and unchanged and repentant
but what can you do.
-- "From a Berkeley Notebook"

Suddenly
I'm stretched enough to call certain of my days
the old days, remembering how we burned
to hear of the destruction of the world,
how we hoped for it until many of us were dead,
the most were lost, and a couple lucky
enough to stand terrified outside the walls
of Jerusalem knowing things we never learned.
-- "Ten Months After Turning Thirty"

[Stefan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have tried to get into Denis Johnson a couple of times but so far I have not succeeded. I guess, his writing is just not for me. The only novels that I kind of liked were ‘’Resuscitation of a Hanged Man” and “Fiskadoro” — but I wasn’t really thrilled while and after reading them. I kept reading high praise for Denis Johnson so I bought his latest collection of stories: “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” and came to the conclusion that the best thing about this collection was its title. Finally I also gave his poetry a try and, alas, I could not get into it — the majority of these poems (although I would refrain from calling quite a few of these snippets “poems”) did not connect with me — neither the language nor the subject matter grabbed me in any way, made me reread, mark up, take notes. To me, there are a couple of intriguing verses — that’s it

Mostly, I found the construction of Johnson’s poems, his use of language (especially the imagery he chooses) odd and unsatisfying:

“…you know our clothes / woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels”

“my office smells like a theory”

“I can see the lights / of the city I came from, / can remember how a boy sets out / like something thrown from the furnace / of a star.”

His similes often feel abstract and stale — many poems read as if Johnson just wanted to write something that sounds different or odd — but there is not much behind this abstract oddity.

He often uses abstract terms and combines them in unfitting ways. Some of the poems are like longer strings of beads leading nowhere.
I couldn’t really find anything that grabbed me: no fascinating metaphors, no astonishing enjambments, no funny or memorable rhymes, no relatable speakers.

It seems, Mr. Johnson, you are not for me.

[Jennifer Juffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Learning of Johnson’s death as I picked up this book shocked me.
I don’t know why it hit me so profoundly. Perhaps because the words he used convey accurately and profoundly life’s necessities, with its glorious hardships and its serenely beautiful miracles.
Life encapsulates all of these experiences from birth to the grave.
It’s the cyclical nature of being.
Ignoring the brevity of everyone’s lives is to miss the point of life.

I’m grateful he took pen to paper. His thoughts, ideas and his visions about beauty/about life, regardless of its inevitable pain, unfairness, and cruelty will be succeeded by future generations.
I derive a great deal of comfort from that.... after all.... “I’ll tell you the story of my life. You’ll make a million.”.

[Jackson Lyda · Rating 4 out of 5]

“As drink gave way to drink, the slow / unfathomable voices of luncheon made / a window of ultraviolet light in the mind, / through which one at last saw the skeleton/ of everything, stripped of any sense or consequence, / freed of geography and absolutely devoid / of charm; and in this originating / brightness you might see / somebody putting a napkin against his lips / or placing a blazing credit card on a plastic tray / and you’d know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say.”

- from The Veil

“If I am alive now, / it is only // to be in all this / making all possible. / I am glad to be / finally a part / of such machinery. I was / after all not so fond / of living, and there comes / into me, when I see / how little I liked / being a man, a great joy. // Look out our astounding / clear windows before evening. / It is almost as if / the world were blue / with some lubricant, / it shines so.”

- from Looking Out the Window Poem

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I try to read at least one poem every morning before work, and this book has been in my rotation since last summer. The good poems are really good and make you think "there's Denis Johnson." As with a Collected edition, some of the poems included are not the sharpest, nor do they feel significant on their own, but as a whole this book meant a lot to me when I chose to visit it.

[Aidan Jude · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure if this would be considered traditional poetry, but the blurbs of thought Johnson lays bare are incredibly intricate and exceedingly profound. Very, very impressed with this work.

Have not been a huge fan of his longer novels, but he is hands down the best short story and sheer prose author I’ve ever read.

Looking forward to more of his.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most perfect collections of poetry ever written. I could put this down.

[Andrea Levin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems range in quality from just under three stars to five stars.

[Stephen Lamb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become.

[Buck]

Johnson’s prose or so rhythmic and poetic I was curious about his poetry. And as I figured, it’s just as good as his prose.

[Felix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comforting always is what these poems are, but the words get blunt after a while: only so much yearning one can hold about the evening shadows, after all. Yet he tries!

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for The Confession of St. JimRalph
By Denis Johnson

[Bill Comfortable · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books of poetry you'll ever read.

[Matt Knippel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never actually reviewed a book of poetry and I'm having a hard time w/ this one b/c yeah I really dig this book and it proves that Mr. Johnson can literally write anything extremely well but am coming up short on specific reasons outside of the general tone and themes represented in these poems. I tend to prefer the longer more rollicking poems that follow a kinda story albeit a bit fractured and stream of consciousy. but the shorter, simpler, more cerebral ones also have their moments. it was also nice have the collected works in a chronological order so you can see him develop and change as a poet. and I can't stress enough that if you're a fan of Johnson's fiction then you should probably check this book out b/c it really captures the feel of America and the hopeless people that inhabit it just as well as his fiction.

[Brad Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find it truly hard to review a book of poetry since it's a very subjective medium. There is no story or character arcs to comment on, more like explosions of consciousness put on paper. So this review will be short.

But as a lover of Denis Johnson these poems are beauty, isolation, sadness and transcending thought in poem form and I loved every word. Johnson is a master of finding these themes in everyday situations whether it's working a night shift as a construction worker or waking up next to the person you love his words capture that special feeling we all have experienced.

If you like poetry, hell even if you don't read this collection it won't disappoint. I feel it sums up this man and everything he tries to say in this. Life is a beauty and a horror we have to find the cracks in between and even though we aren't always successful it's worth aspiring to.

[Ethan Inglis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably a near perfect poetry collection (there’s two unfortunate phrases in here) but I don’t think I’ll give star ratings to poetry collections. Inspired by Bukowski clearly but not as objectifying. Johnson’s highs in poetry are maybe not as great as the best of his narrative work but I believe that you can see how it influenced the greatness of his prose and I’ll come back to this anthology often.

Collects all but two of his published poems (I’ll have to find a way to seek that pair out eventually) and moves from his late teens to his late forties. DJ continues to blow me away with his use of language.