Because of poetry i have a really big house - Kent Johnson

Poetry.

Offense given; offense taken.

Betrayals remembered and the betrayers unforgiven.

Kent Johnson's mordant poems burn away the scrimshaw, the lace-making, the dreck that passes for poetry today, exposing the hypocrisy of our official poetry culture where a cadre of pampered bourgeoisie imagine themselves enlightened revolutionaries, and the poetics of the avant-garde has congealed into a set of implicit rules more formulaic than the traditions it seeks to supplant.

A book like this is rare and necessary in every age.

Let the refiner's fire break forth, lest universal darkness bury all.

--James Chapson Kent Johnson is an avant-garde poet without an avant-garde.

He is] an antidote to the sentimental courtesies and complacencies that prevent a conversation about what and where poetry might be from soon beginning.

--Keith Tuma Kent] Johnson's poems are like unchained pit bulls tossed into a school yard--somebody is going to get bit.

But you almost have to admire all that taut muscle & those unstoppable jaws.

--Ron Silliman.