Quiver by Luke Johnson
Texas Review Press, 2023
Johnson’s debut full-length collection, Quiver, does in fact tremble with the dark urges of boyhood, the desperate hungers of the human body, the quiet cruelties we inflict and endure. Expanding on his chapbook :boys, he casts an unflinching gaze on the ghosts of his childhood and the silent demons that haunt the landscapes of men’s memories, as well as the resolutions he’s made as a father to break the cycle of masculine violence.
These poems recall how he has seen such brutality visited upon animals of all kinds: a childhood friend “unsnapped the sternum” of a mouse, a poem’s speaker left a mallard’s “bludgeoned beak” dripping, a seven-year-old “smothered a frog and fed each leg / to [his] quivering sister.” Humans are not spared either. In “Numbers 14:18,” his father breaks four fingers on a drunk man’s hand, and we’re left wondering if he’ll have mercy on the fifth. In “The Undoing,” a father ties his son to a tree after he finds his boy “fondling men / beneath the bleachers.” It’s not always clear whether a poem’s speaker is Johnson or an invented voice, but it doesn’t really matter. As one poem asserts, he and all boys are “bred to die” and “asked to praise the blood.”
There are, however, moments of beauty and tenderness amid the darkness. In “Larkspur,” Johnson’s daughter performs a rain dance “with both palms / raised, psalms / the blanched sky,” and when alone on a boat in “Catalina,” he thinks of his mother as he watches “a glass squid / rise fluorescent / fold like flamed origami.” Johnson’s sensitive eye and lyrical ear quicken the raw, aching sequences he relives on the page.
Having recently become a father myself, I’ve been ingesting poetry about that indefinable relationship, that sacred responsibility. So when halfway through a poem seemingly about a stillborn calf, Johnson admits, “That summer my son was putty in my hands […] He came / as one comes wailing from resurrection,” I’m hearing that howl. When his children appear in a poem, it becomes clear that while Johnson refuses to gloss over the mean tendencies of manhood, he will not glorify them either. In fact, from the vantage point of fatherhood, he hopes his son will ultimately overcome those inclinations. Toward the collection’s beginning, he notices how his son “swats a finch with a bat / and laughs,” and toward the end he warns his boy not to snap the neck of robins, though his hand will itch to. When his child is repeatedly stabbing a heron’s belly, he pleads, “But listen, son, listen: / I’m asking you / to set the weapon down.”
The diction of Quiver is sparse and frank, potent verbs often intensifying a sensation or scene: In one poem, “a wildfire gnawed spruce” while “silence lumbered / the sky’s carved dome,” and in another, “magnolias / divorced their blossoms.” Spanning the collection, there is hardly a superfluous phrase, the muscle of each confession and recollection pared down to its supple, pulsing core. Scorching and illuminating, Johnson’s fearless language quivers like a flame—lighting a thin, hopeful path through the bleakness; flickering as the reader peers close, ready to burn.
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Ben Groner III is the author of the poetry collection Dust Storms May Exist, forthcoming from Madville Publishing in 2024. He is also the recipient of Texas A&M University’s 2014 Gordone Award for undergraduate poetry and a Pushcart Prize nomination. He has work published in Whale Road Review, GASHER, The South Carolina Review, The Shore, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Formerly a bookseller at Parnassus Books, he lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and son.