Coach House Books, paperback
Publication Date: September 26, 2023
Publisher Marketing: What can we remove from ourselves and still be ourselves?
Written after a brain tumour diagnosis early in the pandemic, The King of Terrors is a meditation on living with illness and the forces required to heal. These forces are not always what we expect - they may not even be medical. Jim Johnstone implies that language, relationships, and our immersion in the natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse. Haunted by the decimation of the North American landscape and the anxiety of living in a polarized society, Johnstone's poems are bodily reflections that ask how we can reframe our past to make sense of the present. The King of Terrors oscillates between the personal and the public, the clinical and the spiritual, so we're never quite sure what we are seeing, no matter how familiar.
"There is a moving, fierce intensity to The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone knowingly reminds us that betrayals of the body are also betrayals of language, 'each bloody / mouthful a sentence fragment.' These are lines of admission, ambition, and harrowing truth, and Johnstone - despite a future only as certain 'as the body // it inhabits' - offers a form of redemption, for the fortitude of the sick, for poetry itself." - Randall Mann, author of A Better Life
