:boys
by Luke Johnson
Blue Horse Press, 2019
Review by Kathryn de Lancellotti
In the age of the female rising—the #MeToo truth telling and dismantling of the patriarchy— poet Luke Johnson wants readers to know that boys have been wounded, too. That boys can be brutal. Boys can be tender. Boys can be perpetrators or victims. Lovers or killers. Sons and fathers. Johnson’s poems hold space for boys on the page as a prayer—a way to face and heal a worldly and familial lineage of fracture. Johnson’s debut book, :boys is a reckoning; a way of thinking and speaking about the past in order to forge a new path for his children, for their children and so forth. It’s a longing for a relationship with the father, both heavenly and earthly. :boys is an unapologetic manifesto, a brutal and beautiful narrative of “a boy of a boy/ of a boy of a boy/ of a boy of a boy/of a boy.”
Johnson’s poems are a constant strain between holding onto the past for fear of losing it or erasing it altogether. The dive into brutality is multi-layered with horror and beauty, trauma and healing. The opening poem titled, “:boys” moves the reader with velocity down the page as we witness a group of boys in a rusty old barn standing in “a riotous circle” watching Smitty pull a blade from his pocket and mutilate a mouse by unsnapping “the sternum/like a bloody brassiere” then moving “toward/the heart/ a porous drum/swelling in his fingers.” The image of a large hand holding a tiny, pulsing red heart paints the brutality of boyhood: the wound of toxic masculinity, bodies broken by large hands and innocent creatures defiled by that dangerous notion of boys being boys.
Johnson’s poems carry a sense of urgency to break through familial fracture and seek shelter in the storm. In “Deadwind” he writes ‘there must be a black umbrella, /always an umbrella, /even when its warm an umbrella/a feeling like an umbrella, /a sadness like sand in the gums.” The poet is always prepared for the rain, always anticipates a storm. Even when the sky is blue, he will find a refuge, a way to protect himself. And the boy with sadness like sand in his gums is a “desperate boy./Charting a route from here, to someplace in heaven.” There’s a father somewhere out there who could hold this boy, make a home for him, protect him, if only he can find a way to the father, to paradise, to anywhere but here.
The speaker carries the shape of his ancestors: a desperate son, a desperate father who longs to reform his family, to end generational suffering. The book opens with an epigraph by James Dickey, “I am here, in my father’s house. /I who am half of your world.” Wholeness is attainable and will happen as the speaker continues to heal the fracture, and for Johnson it is in the words, in the telling where healing is possible by giving this fracture a name—boy. Johnson weaves the narrative and the lyric to carry the reader through the poems. It could be said that the music itself is a form of grace as the language sings readers into a trance, into the divine, and despite some of the challenging content we are elevated to the highest realms, a skill achieved by masters of the lyric narrative.
The penultimate poem, “Song of the Stillborn,” is of the speaker, a father guiding his son through an unjust, brutal world. He writes, “but there’s something beautiful about a body/picked down to its spine. / How it carries its shape. / How it softens over time.” And this, this is the heart of the father who was once a boy, who will always be a son. The world is dark and violent and full of pain, yes, but the pain can soften us, and form us into something tender over time.
The speaker maintains a possessive gaze throughout the book. He owns this truth and will translate it however he must in order to illuminate the page, to end the cycle of familial fracture, to mend a broken world, a broken home. In the final poem, “Finch,” the speaker will patiently “wait by the window, /watching, wait/until sunrise.” He listens to the sound of his son’s feet race across the cloven field where he will protect him, show him how to be a boy who heals the world instead of harming it. He is desperate to stop his son from passing “through the gate:” The ancestral door of trauma his father left wide open. He will close it and lock it, command we hear his cry. He will carry the torch and lead the way through a darkened landscape. A father like a full moon rising over a lake.