The Infernal Now

Arnold Johnston’s The Infernal Now offers us poems that are acutely aware of mortality, counterbalanced by the timelessness of poetic forms, especially the sonnet, which he manages with flair. Johnston looks back to the tacky apartment where I lived alone/On West Main Street, teaching sophomores how not to rhyme, while remaining attuned to the long-standing and present tense true love of [his] life…The world in [his] arms. In this artful sequence of poems, despite the realities of aging, covid, and climate change, Johnston writes his way to where ‘end’ is no verb, but just a noun, a fitting insight from a language-centered life.

-Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Four-Legged Girl

In The Infernal Now, Arnold Johnston puts on full display his strong sense of craft honed throughout his long, distinguished writing career. In his masterful sonnets, and in his other fine poems, Johnston looks at his colorful past and his own mortality with wistful humor and disarming honesty. A delightful collection. We should all be so clear-eyed and good-natured.

-Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy and Birth Marks

I could give all to Time, says Robert Frost, except-except/What I myself have held The poems in Arnold Johnston’s The Infernal Now explore this complication with humor, beauty, and grace; they puzzle over what’s held dear and yet must be let go, and over how on earth we live with that. The passing of friends, hardships of aging, Covid, 9/11, loss, tugs at our successive nows-and yet the force of love, of hope, even of grief, provides a kind of shining forward toward whatever comes.

-Nancy Eimers, author of Oz and A Grammar to Waking