Review: Luke Johnson
On Luke Johnson’s :boys
by Tyler Truman Julian
Luke Johnson’s chapbook, :boys (Blue Horse Press, 2019), is part elegy, part critique of boyhood. With ease, Johnson creates familiar images, snapshots caught in the flash of a Kodak disposable camera. In these images we get a complex definition of childhood, at once romantic and violent. The first poem, the title poem, sets the stakes. Johnson writes,
In a barn
choked by rusty tools
and ragweed
we stood
in riotous circle
watching
fetal mice fill
their fresh lungs with air
when Smitty
behind a tribal smile
pulled a blade from his back pocket…
(“:boys”)
The image continues, presenting a boy who “unsnapped / the [mouse’s] sternum / like a bloody brassiere,” and clues us into what “: boys” is defining. This is no “boys will be boys” justification, but rather a direct critique of it, a critical look at American boyhood and interrogation of the ancient adage, “The sins of the father…” This question runs deep through the chapbook. Johnson’s speaker “rummage[s] / through ruins / of charred bark” and offers another memory: a breakfast with his (presumably) hungover father and uncles. The speaker’s father invites him into his world:
He says: Come sit son,
here, by me, my beautiful boy,
moving a wrinkled
stack of Playboys
and a few bottles of Beam.
I rise to my feet
like white trash royalty,
demand they serve me my meal.
(“WTR”)
It would be easy to read a poem like this and wonder at the poet’s intent, if we’re supposed to read the speaker as reveling in these violent, masculine interactions, but Johnson and his speaker continually break expectations with each new photograph he drops in front of us. Johnson’s speaker says, Yes, I want my father’s approval. I want to belong to this gang of boys that kill baby mice, then turns around and offers a glimpse into his own fatherhood and the anxiety that comes with knowing what type of world his son will grow in. In “Finch,” Johnson’s speaker explores in his son’s life the same type of boyhood violence he saw in his childhood, but through the lens of an observing adult, one differentiated from his father and actively attempting to create different patterns of behavior. Returning to the motif of ash, Johnson’s speaker presents a roaring fire (the same that swirled amid his uncles and father just transplanted), and he stands outside its flames. It can be assumed that this fire was kindled in the small violences enacted by the father when he was a boy, fueled by the same interactions as those of the speaker and his friends in the barn, but now the speaker is outside it, looking for ways to protect his son from it. The speaker reports,
…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.
(“Finch”)
This is the crux of the chapbook. Johnson’s speaker has emerged from the crucible of boyhood with mature goals, desiring to end the cycle of violence created by his father and the fathers of his friends. Luke Johnson’s poems achieve what the best of Stephen King’s reflections on boyhood and friendship and their strangeness offer us. He presents the violent and mundane American rural with the strength of Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison. Johnson gives us images, fragments of familiar memory, and makes us look hard before we paste them into our photo albums and move on. :boys offers nostalgia and critique, forcing itself into our current American moment, asking for mindful reflection.