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 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



"Using in-jokes, old arguments and absurdities, Kent Johnson satirizes the 'ruthless kid-poets with their little cymbals and bells.' Yet satire's bleak irreverence is also a kind of intimacy: we can't mock what we don't know well. More earnestly, Nuper Verba urges us to 'make lasting song of our loss, /That it may rise above the shallow attentions of our clan.' Pay attention, then, to these poems. Say poetry is a haunted mansion or a freakish funhouse. There, a hall of mirrors ceases to reflect the tiresome egoism of poetry culture and instead offers 'endless selves receding, tinier and tinier, until' one can no longer see oneself. We knew we were there, far back, but we were also gone. That, Johnson shows us, is where poetry truly has the last word." -Elizabeth Robinson


"Kent Johnson is notorious for his mordant wit and tenacious satire, turned, more often than not, on the contemporary poetry scene. In the past, his ironic stance has been a massive, defensive engine against the crass, the venal, the insufferably narcissistic. Now, in Nuper Verba, wit and satire are subsumed, having become a given, and a new horizon opens before us. What Yeats, translating Swift's epitaph, calls 'savage indignation' is still there, but, especially in the magnificent Horatian Odes, a passionate honesty and vulnerability emerge to complement the intelligence of Johnson's provocations. There has been nothing like them since Pound's 'Homage to Sextus Propertius'. This is a gorgeous, heartbreaking book." -Norman Finkelstein


"As a poet, I do and do not know why anyone would take up the vocation today, especially when just being human is considered by many to be despicable in itself. But I don't know. When I read Kent's work, I want to believe in the authority of poetry again. I know that it still exists, right here, with me and others, outside of the bullshit, outside of the Poetry Foundation, out of reach of all those so-called poet laureates out there, outside of the institutions vying for power, outside of the popular poets dying for even more attention, leaving their cheap verses all over the internet like trending memes. The thought that poetry might not exist without all of these contentions and contradictions, though, really troubles my sleep. But then this makes me think I know what it is that Kent's work does; it acknowledges a mystery. Maybe the only mystery: that Poetry could be writing all of us into existence, orchestrating this whole realm with authority built on ephemerality and balance, like some invisible but compassionate network of Chaos. Again, I don't know. Read Nuper Verba because you don't really have a choice." -Carlos Lara


"In the central sequence of Nuper Verba, fifteen 'Horatian Odes,' satirist, analyst, and sometimes starter of poetry wars Kent Johnson returns to one of the origins of Western lyric in lines by turn barbed, laugh-out-loud, and delicately touching. Transformed ('transcreated' or 'translucinated' in Johnson's own terms) from their Latin originals and prior English translations, these poems often express 'in my last days' the opposite of the satirist's desire: 'I want to be dulcis and not acidus, believe me.' For all their self-reflexive layering, their comic allusiveness, their unremitting takedowns of poetic careerism meeting Horace's own self-ironizing aspirations to poetic immortality, these are also autobiographical poems about Johnson's own life, career, and political and intellectual commitments. Tutelary spirits like Edward Dorn-perhaps the chemo-ridden satirist of Chemo Sabe-appear in Johnson's ode to satyr-ists, as irony and energetic vitriol is clamped and silenced in the Scold's Bridle: 'stammer, satire, your pitiful last...' And yet the familiar impulse remains: 'Yes, tell me I am among the / Poets'-that itch, somewhere between impulse and deep conviction against all the odds, that runs from Horace to the Williams of 'The Desert Music' to 'Kentuvius Maximus in his / Big house.' Here 'my heart belongs to ... a torn, Janus-faced god' both of scorching satire and lyric poignancy, of public vituperation and private loss in 'this arbor's darkening shade'." -Alan Golding


"Detained in his wound, everything becomes observable. The aching cave forever open. He blesses us in the evenings and frightens us in the mornings. No bridges to burn. He is the warning that is spoken of." -MTC Cronin