DIARY OF A STRING, Mark Francis Johnson

In Diary of a String, Johnson offers the reader yet another beautifully psychedelic, at times hilarious, at times gut-wrenchingly sad snapshot of this (his) constantly expanding and accreting universe. We amble through a flotsam of compacted late capital stratae of trash, universes of foreclosed possibilities, weird vegetables, persons and things assembled in the fucked desklight of gig economy "free time," genealogies of items, worlds, and characters defined by mishap and obscurity. All of this and more, etc., as the salesman would refrain--presented with a diction, syntax, and narrative architecture that all at once seems to ooze and move with generosity, possibility, and mutable unselfishness while exacting a sharp, crystalline method of meaning and representation. Everything is possible here, even beyond the horizon of the given story, even as the horizon of the story doubles and fractals recursively past the limits of what we hold to be true as story, as horizon, as possibility. "The /spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer," and we should all be so lucky that Johnson is able to record some of it for us to sample.

The interrogative mode toboggans through Mark Francis Johnson's Diary of a String, the book's speaker posing discomfiting questions: "Are not most days inferior/ goods, calculated to deceive?" But this surfeit of inquiry doesn't yield a vision of one seeking earnest answers— instead, there is the palpable sickness of the plaintive inhered within the book's pages. When Adorno writes that "the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick," the catastrophe inhered in the book becomes more clear: the sick diagnose the sick diagnose the sick diagnose the sick, ad infinitum. As readers, we too are party to "the forcible prohibition of discussion/ of misery, the object and tendency// of which is to promote/ misery." Perhaps the most shocking quality of Diary of a String, then, is how it maintains Johnson's penchant for off-kilter humor and wild verbiage despite (or because of?) its clear-eyed, suitably bummed assessment of the depraved world at hand. With this entry in Johnson's ever-growing catalog, readers have another sampling of one of our finest poets at his very best.
- Ted Rees

Diary of a String
Mark Francis Johnson
ISBN: 979-8-9899037-0-2

6" x9", 82pp, perfect bound
First edition, first printing of 350
Printed in “New York,” occupied Canarsie and Munsee Lenape lands, “USA”
Design by The Aliens

$18, plus media mail shipping in "USA"
$20 shipping "everywhere else"