"Like their e-mails, Johnson’s poetry is evocative and fluid.Shade The Kingis a long poem, reading like a scroll, punctuated with songlike moments of vulnerability and musings on the unraveling and unfolding of a world that’s at once tender and cruel. “What happens when I’m 50?” Johnson asks, toward the poem’s beginning. “Will I be living on a boat with a green house because the caps have totally melted and all the fish are dead? I refuse to go to Mars. I hope, at least, they find a way to make dogs live as long as humans so that I can have my dog forever — we will die together at a time of our choosing.” Here, one paragraph encapsulates dystopian fear and fierce warmth; there are few that don’t."
