Arnold Johnston’s poetry is as smart, crafty, wise, and entertaining as anything being written, according to Richard Katrovas. WHERE WE’RE GOING, WHERE WE’VE BEEN is filled with poems that strike a graceful balance between structural formality and an always accessible informal voice. Johnston’s work offers a wry, often humorous consideration of love and mortality that Gail Wronsky calls both tender and unsentimental. As a writer of plays and fiction, a translator from several languages, and an actor-singer, he understands-in the words of Stuart Dybek- that there’s a song at the heart of every poem. This is a book to be savored like a well-aged malt scotch.