Review by Jami Macarty

Before The King of Terrors was the title of Jim Johnstone’s 2023 poetry book, it was the title of a 1910 Sunday sermon preached by Henry Scott Holland, a 1977 horror novel written by Robert Bloch, and a 2022 horror film directed by Ryan Callaway. Like those before him, Johnstone’s poetry book regards death and its associates, madness and fear.

The poet’s approach is a meditative lyric, “a dream, into a song.” “Fear” is an anaphora, “leading by example” and “running free” throughout the poems. The particular fears have to do with what is “unseen”: “the virus” and “the tumour,” COVID-19 and meningioma. In “parallel / time,” global and personal health crises haunt Johnstone’s poems. In response, the poet seems to be prompted to accept Chronos, assisted by Derrida (“becoming / the always-already absent present”), and to confess to the “ghosts of former lovers.”

In the poem “The Darkroom,” among my favorites for its candor and heart, the poet finds “noun and verb” between apology and prayer to admit:

But I’ve said terrible things about those
whose only mistake was that they weren’t me,
didn’t show up in the mirror where I stared
and stared trying to make sure I was more
and better, where my face would blur
then realign as if hope could change the way
my actions were perceived.

The intimate and “direct nature of [the poet’s] address” in this poem and throughout the book takes the reader into his confidence and illuminates the “interstitial space,” “hovering between two ways”—between “instinct” and “change,” “fragment” and “renunciation,” “a liar” and “a lyre.” In The King of Terrors, Jim Johnstone offers readers poems for the uncertain time we “inhabit” “between / age and agency.”

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The King of Terrors by Jim Johnstone. Coach House Books, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The super real, feminist, and sharp-edged poems of Catriona Wright’s Continuity Errors are at turns an “embodied presence / in virtual environments,” a “fever / dream of escape,” a “walk through the cemetery,” and “a scathing assessment” of our time. To tell us like it is, our self-deprecating narrator, a fierce new mother, “got” her wings “removed,” owns her “inner bitch,” and admits she “know[s] … little about how to live / a good life or about who [she] want[s] to be.”

A line item in her assessment: The angelic/“rowdy” paradigm for women within her family and the impact a woman’s choices have on “job, … marriage, / a life organized // around wealth.”

Another item: Relationship difficulties. We are reminded “don’t kid // yourself, love has always been / transactional.” Our “demons / look like our mothers… exes / … bosses and professors” who “condescend / and lecture and harangue, activating / shames from childhood.”

These poems implicate “parental models,” gatekeepers, “scammers,” “tourists,” the “betrayer and betrayed,” and the “visionaries and oracles,” and they make us face the “old sputtering hurts” we cause ourselves, one another, and our world. This is the world our narrator has brought her child into, admitting we “can’t fix” or “staunch” its bleeding fast enough. It may not be fair, but some of us “get to stay here longer than the white rhinos, / the bees.” Informed by environmental ethicist Michael Vincent McGinnis’s term “species loneliness,” Catriona Wright’s poems “flicker” and “mourn,” and are “as likely as anything / to banish loneliness from the world.”

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Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright. Coach House Books, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The poems, “filled with ellipses and reversals,” of T. Liem’s Slows: Twice are offered by a “speaker” who doesn’t “always feel / like” they are who they “say” they are, from a “threshold / between [self] and potential in any direction.” That is, the poems explore and explicate a betweenness: “on either side / of leaving… on either side / of the kind of words that look / right at you and leave you / in the middle of nowhere.” Even “nowhere” is “somewhere.”

This “threshold” is a way to “conceive of what a border could consist of.” A “border” is a place where “two things can be true at once”; both a place where “every fact has an afterlife” and a place “to link arms with some future.” At a border, time folds in on itself. The present reflects “what looks back at you”; the future “what can unfold from hurt.”

Liem’s poems swing on the hinges of “asking and repeating” the question: “[W]hat will carry you through what hurt you?” The poet uses mirror imaging and strikethroughs of poem text to suggest this phenomenon of “renewal or expiry.” The poet also uses their poems to argue with “time… spent // in omission” because, they assert, “there is no place and time / without names.” Our “bodies become an etymology”; “language is change.”

Dear Reader, whether you would choose to “slow time, / speed it up,” “[w]ouldn’t you like to be transported?” To read T. Liem’s Slows: Twice is to encounter “what other kind of living”—and writing—”is possible.”

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Slows: Twice by T. Liem. Coach House Books, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.