Poetry. "Offense given; offense taken. Betrayals remembered and the betrayers unforgiven. Kent Johnson's mordant poems burn away the scrimshaw, the lace-making, the dreck that passes for poetry today, exposing the hypocrisy of our official poetry culture where a cadre of pampered bourgeoisie imagine themselves enlightened revolutionaries, and the poetics of the avant-garde has congealed into a set of implicit rules more formulaic than the traditions it seeks to supplant. A book like this is rare and necessary in every age. Let the refiner's fire break forth, lest universal darkness bury all."--James Chapson "Kent Johnson is an avant-garde poet without an avant-garde...[He is] an antidote to the sentimental courtesies and complacencies that prevent a conversation about what and where poetry might be from soon beginning."--Keith Tuma "[Kent] Johnson's poems are like unchained pit bulls tossed into a school yard--somebody is going to get bit. But you almost have to admire all that taut muscle & those unstoppable jaws."--Ron Silliman