Brutal Naturalism: On Luke Johnson’s “Quiver”

Luke Johnson | Quiver | Texas Review Press | October 2023 | 88 Pages

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At a campout, when I was ten, a small group of us boys gathered around another boy who had captured a few frogs from the creek. We watched him squeeze the creature in his muddy hands until a grotesque bubble began to emerge from its anus, a traumatic event I now know is called an amphibian prolapse. Our initial laughter and jeers gave way to a wide-eyed silence. Too chickenshit to protest this active cruelty, we merely observed the squishing continue until the animal’s guts emerged from its mouth. The boy then tossed the carcass away without a care into the long grass. He wiped his hands in the dirt. We scuttled to our next budding maleficence.

This is a shameful memory. Such recollections function like fishing bobbers, but inverted. Rather than staying visible until tripped, they are immediately submerged, only to surface at unpredictable and unwelcome moments.

Luke Johnson’s debut collection Quiver gives these themes a scathing treatment. In typically short lines grouped often in two- and three-line stanzas, the poems comprising Quiver expose a sharp contrast between lyric eloquence and bare observations of rural landscape where cruelty and death are always close at hand. Johnson places his readers within this brutal naturalism as he explores the individual capacity for violence and the rippling ramifications of that violence as it extends beyond the self. In doing so, Quiver dramatizes a childhood coming face to face with its own reckoning. The poems and their recollections become probing inquiries for us onlookers. Are scenes of violence necessary to test our mettle? At what point does an act go beyond the pale on the continuum of toughness to cruelty? And, once reckoned with, how might past acts of destruction make way for artistic creation?

The opening poem prompted the memory I shared at the beginning because of its unsettling similarity. Titled “(boys),” the poem depicts a macabre ritual:

In a barn
choked by rusty tools
and ragweed

we stood
in a riotous circle

watching
fetal mice fill
their fresh lungs with air

A named figure in the poem, “Smitty,” then takes it upon himself to “slice one down the abdomen / with ballpoint precision” while the others watch:  

each of us stone-silent
and cold

as Smitty unsnapped
the sternum

then moved toward
the heart

a porous drum
swelling in his fingers

This tableau vivant quite purposely means to shock and, perhaps, even disturb; a better opening there is not.

And so, in trying to articulate just what Johnson’s process reminds me of, the best image I could conjure was of a vivisection. The reason to write such poetry—the compulsion to write such poetry—emerges from the desire to flay and spread open the guts, to commit sin and confess it, to claim responsibility by way of observational learning. We are the audience in The Gross Clinic. And Johnson, like Dr. Samuel Gross, isn’t here only to lecture. 

Such a scene plays out in “Spit,” which sees a “daddy” getting ginned up at breakfast and then taking the speaker out ostensibly to shoot skeet only to wind up field-dressing a gamebird:

Once, plucking feathers
and dripping a dead bird dry,
he made me
put my hand inside
and pull the heart
place it under my tongue.
It snapped and quivered
dissolved in spit—
withered
and the winds laid down.
The canyon suddenly quiet. 

The grotesquerie of the ritual is a heavy force. And while this poem is not the eponymously named poem of the collection, it carries significance for one of several occurrences of the word “quivered.” What, the poem asks, takes place if we all ingest a quivering heart or, at the very least, internalize one. What transformations, what magical thinking might result?

I’m reminded of the cliché application of the descriptor “unflinching” when it comes to many a literary work characterized as marginally memoiristic or confessional. “Unflinching” in Johnson’s case is decidedly the wrong word to use. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Quiver demonstrates weakness; Johnson’s willingness to visit and revisit scenes of deep distress is part of the poems’ strength. Rather, I push against the temptation to describe Quiver as “unflinching” because of its acute experience with pain as well as a profound susceptibility to it. Quiver, in other words, flinches in the face of harm, for pain is all too familiar in these poems. They come from a place of experience and wince. Here comes inquiry, introspection, perhaps even healing. 

The hurt in this work may be best thought of as biblical. It is no coincidence that a reference to that book takes a prominent position in the development of the collection: titled “Numbers 14:18,” this poem relays another story of shocking cruelty:

I’ve never told you
how my father tied
a drunk man to a chair

and snapped the first four fingers
on his left hand. 

The poem opens with this diligent reporting and critical distance, or so it would seem. Also notable is that the title and, indeed, the poem more widely, contains no footnote nor epigraph to the scriptural reference for which it is named: “The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” Throughout Quiver, Johnson takes special notice of the latter half of this verse, the dolorous half of this verse, wherein a father’s harshness takes on a second life (or more) in the secret it becomes to his grown child. Fate plays out expectedly, and by the poem’s close, we read:

Sometimes that’s all
that it takes. One taste.
One. For deadwind.

to enter and eat
the insides

of a boy of a boy of a boy of a boy
of a boy of a boy of a boy—

Generational faults and failures become the animating force of the collection. We glimpse peeks at the “sin of the parents” and even a sense beyond that of how they too may claim to be equally hurt, to be more sinned against than sinning. Offering several of them scattershot:

“All I wanted was a mom without / wounds” 

and

“This poem / has a house on a slipped foundation”

and even paratextually in Quiver’s dedication and acknowledgments pages, where inscription and gratitude go, respectively, “To dad, my kids and the ghosts that nearly broke us” and to “our father, Garry Ray, for whom this book is both love letter and exorcism. I miss you, dad.”

It’s in “floodghost” that Quiver comes closest to spelling out the lineage of acting out, that most euphemistic of euphemisms. The poem shares a mother’s struggle and the cyclical boyhood cruelty and violence taking on another phase of life:

Mother couldn’t manage
what sated me, so she prayed:
sought in silence
a substance that’d soothe,
something familial with grace.

This desperate ploy for peace or something like it falls short except for “song” itself, of “Mother making / contracts with the sky” amid the youthful destruction which reads as much as a confession as it does a cry for help

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.

These are not easy recollections. This is a cleansing. A bloodletting. A ritual itself. 

If there is a salve here, it comes in the hard-won second act that emerges out of Johnson’s wrestling with responsibility. It comes, in short, in Quiver’s gentler generations: the new ones, the children of the children who’ve grown up under and despite other cruelties. In “Move in the world, my daughter,” the poem cries out urgent advice in quiet desperation amid worry for a girl moving in a world that might rather her stay still:

O darling,

when I say sit, please stand.
Do not heed my monstrosities.

The sentiment finds itself underscored in later lines:

Shout loudly, sway
and bare your teeth.

Cry by creeks
where prey seek shelter

and lullaby there. 

So, too, Quiver passes advice to a boy in lines from “This is what it looks like, son”:

It’s sick, I know, how
Man manipulates beauty.
But listen, son, listen:

I’m asking you
to set the weapon down
and look toward the Pacific. 

Markedly more a warning plea to adopt peace, this latter poem seeks gentleness as a corrective to masculine sickness. Where the daughter might find courage, the son may opt for nonviolent observation. 

At least as a starting point. 

A harm reduction strategy. 

Whatever impulse emanates from these moments, it’s a far cry from the flayed brutality and complicit violence at work elsewhere in the collection. It may be the tenderest a reformed brute may get, but it’s tenderness still.