In and Out by Arnold Johnston celebrates romantic love, despite and because of mortality, with playfulness and passion. These masterful poems are intimate and universal at once. -Hilma Wolitzer, novelist, Guggenheim and NEA Fellow. author of The Doctor's Daughter, Hearts, Ending, and Tunnel of Love
In and Out: Love Poems displays the range of writing expertise by Arnold Johnston, highlighting free verse, Italian and English sonnets, pantoums, rhyming poems and even a ghazal! But you don't need to know what these forms are because the poems speak for themselves, their crisp language, their rhythm, their imagery. It's not often one comes across a consummate writer, one as seasoned as Johnston. These poems are a testament to his life as a poet and playwright, but also to his enduring love for his wife. He impresses us with his adept use of language, but more importantly, with his honest expression of desire and contentment found in the lives of those lucky to be married for a long time.
-David James, poet, playwright, author of Alive in Your Skin While You Still Own It and She Dances Like Mussolini
Arnold Johnston's In and Out is Old School Postmodern, which is to say it seeks to apportion the slanted truth of woeful existence with measured grace, and to indicate redemption in the graceful act that each of his poems embodies. Arnold Johnston warps the tradition-from within-into a shape appropriate to the historical moment. Possessing a gift for constructing stunning metaphysical conceits, and possessing as well an ear as finely tuned as that of any poet alive on the planet, Johnston is composing verse that exists outside of spacetime, which some theoretic physicists are now telling us may not exist, anyway. I do not know of a living poet who deserves more to be read by discerning readers than Arnold Johnston.
-Richard Katrovas, poet, novelist, memoirist, author of Poets and the Fools Who Love Them, Alien Love, and Scorpio Rising
