Quiver: Poems

by Luke Johnson

0 ratings • 0 reviews • 0 shelved
Book cover for Quiver

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

Quiver is a book of reckoning, a book of ghosts, a book of lineal fracture and generational fatherlesness. It’s a visceral guide through boyhood into fatherhood. One that yields witness to trauma, erotic shames, brutalities and toxic masculinity, and in so doing, emerges with a speaker beginning to free himself. Patricia Smith said it best: “Quiver will change the way you see.”
“floodghost”
Mother couldn’t manage
what sated me, so she prayed:
sought in silence
a substance that’d soothe,
something familial with grace.
I groaned. Broke bodies
over blacktop’s pane, a bottom-
less well of blood. At seven
I smothered a frog and fed each leg
to my quivering sister
laughed while she choked out its skin. At twelve,
I pulled a pistol from under
the vacant shed and shoved
its shudder to a schoolboy’s temple, teased 
while he wept in his piss.
And yet all along a Psalm, a satchel
of prayer: song. Mother making
contracts with the sky, while I
tore its pages to light a fire, warm
my hands around it. Radiant blue. Red
from a faraway pine.
  • ISBN10 1680033204
  • ISBN13 9781680033205
  • Publish Date 31 October 2023
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Texas Review Press
  • Format Paperback (US Trade)
  • Pages 126
  • Language English