Frank Paino reviews
:boys by Luke Johnson

Luke Johnson’s haunting debut chapbook is a paradox which both beckons and repels as it races headlong through its eighteen, often-brutal poems. Johnson has a gift for clarity, and his gaze is unflinching, but readers with the temerity to hold that gaze will be deeply, unforgettably rewarded.

In the titular opening poem, a group of boys who “stood in a riotous circle” around a nest of fetal mice, fall silent as Smitty cuts “one open with ball point precision”,

…unsnap[s]
the sternum
like a bloody brassiere

then move[s] toward
the heart

a porous drum
swelling in his fingers.

In subsequent pieces, the speaker reflects on a childhood marked by brutality . . . cigarette burns, sexual violence, suicide, a harsh, distant father who breaks a man’s fingers and, in the memorable “Deadwind,” strangles “the neck of a bottle” and later, eerily, simply “a neck.”

But if: boys catalogues the often-brutish rites of male passage, it doesn’t sanction them. Ultimately, these terse, strangely-lyrical poems celebrate a man who passes through the dark gauntlet of his youth into the transformative light of fatherhood. In the book’s final poem, he watches as his son “swats a finch with his bat and laughs.” Unlike his own father, the speaker chooses to answer that act with a gorgeously-rendered tenderness as, later, he watches a wildfire burn through the night:

…I’d wait
by the window, watching, wait
until sunrise. Listen for sounds
of my son’s feet
racing across the cloven field, forbid
him to pass through the gate.

Luke Johnson received an MFA from Sierra Nevada College. His poems can be found in Kenyon Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Nimrod and Thrush. He was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Award. Johnson is the author of the chapbook, :boys (Blue Horse Press, 2019).

Frank Paino has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a 2016 Individual Excellence Award from The Ohio Arts Council, a Pushcart Prize and The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature. He is the author of three books of poetry. His newest, Obscura, is available from Orison Books. (frankpaino.net)