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(More customer reviews)In "Degrees of Freedom," with pen in hand and an open heart, the Poet, Nicholas Johnson sees deeper than deep as he takes the reader through a maze called Life. This Chapbook is a gem of a find written in an original voice filled with brutal honesty much like the late, great beloved poet, Silvia Plath.
Like the Creator and with a poetic wisdom, Nicholas Johnson shows a deep understanding of the fragile state of mankind. Johnson gives back to the world with words while "seeing or perhaps knowing" that in the end, we may find that we are all cut from the same cloth. He writes what we "think" but never dare say. He takes the reader on an unselfish, bittersweet flight with words that flow like a fine wine amid the shadows then into a dark that tiny rays of light try to penetrate... Then, with the face of the sun, Johnson gently brings us back to Earth / Reality only after we have walked in his footsteps while nodding our heads and thinking: Yes! We feel the depth of his words when he takes us right to Silvia Plath's pain and fragile state of mind, body, and spirit but unlike Johnson, Plath relented to self never to pick up another piece of blank paper to fill yet another blank page with Life's haunted truths like Johnson has in the poem, "Going Down--for Sylvia Plath." And I, for one, am glad he did.
It is with great pleasure I recommend "Degrees of Freedom," to the literary world as "a grand jewel" of a Poetry Chapbook. Enjoy.
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Poetry. "With metaphoric dexterity and an uncanny ability to invigorate common expressions so that they become pure poetry, Nick Johnson writes his poems with skill and candor. The opening of each poem in Degrees of Freedom parts the sky with perceptual lightning, and by the time we finish, a devastating clap of truth's thunder rolls in, taking the poem and us by storm"--Molly Peacock. "Nicholas Johnson is a poet of incandescent wit, the kind of mordant intelligence whose first target is its own assumptions, and a strange haunted tenderness. I love his work for its dark, sotto voce originality. This is a collection that the writing community has been waiting for"-Dennis Nurkse. Nicholas Johnson's poetry has been published in Poetry London, Poetry Wales, American Poetry Review, Shenandoah, American Letters & Commentary, The Journal, Pivot, and the 1997 Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry.
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