I recently received in the mail a copy of Kent Johnson’s newish book from Shears­man, Homage to the Last Avant-​Garde. It’s some­thing of a selected poems in minia­ture, col­lect­ing work from other books like Epi­gram­mi­ti­tis and I Once Met, as well as one poem, “Into the Heat-​Forged Air,” which first appeared in the last issue of Chicago Review.

Anyone who knows Kent at all will rec­og­nize that the advice he offers his son Brooks in “Sentimental Piscatorial”—”stay low, walk slow, / and lay the fly right along the veloc­ity // changes”—is not advice that he seems ever to have much trou­bled him­self with, a fact the world is richer for. His poems are full of prose, indi­rec­tion, and fun, and his jaunty mock eru­di­tion (like the appear­ance of Roberto Bolaño’s vis­ceral real­ists in a foot­note to “A God”) is pos­si­ble only because he’s got more than enough of the real thing.

I like Kent’s work because he refuses to hide the ambi­tion and earnesty that drive him, but what sets him apart from his peers is that he also does not mask the embar­rass­ment and self-​recrimination that those twin qual­i­ties inevitably inspire. This alone makes the book worthy of rec­om­men­da­tion, and it’s just barely enough to for­give the fact that dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion didn’t make it into “Poetry Blogs (of the Fourth Gen­er­a­tion) in Zürich.”

If you’re still not con­vinced, read Linh Dinh’s take on the book here and then buy it here.