"The City"
from Peter Johnson's
Eduardo & "I"

Peter Johnson:

Peter Johnson's books of prose poems include Pretty Happy! (White Pine Press, 1997), Love Poems for the Millennium (Quale Press, 1998), and Miracles & Mortifications (White Pine Press, 2001), which received the 2001 James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets. His collection of stories, I'm a Man, was published by White Pine Press in 2003, and his short novel, What Happened, is forthcoming from Front Street Books in 2006. He was awarded creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1999 and from Rhode Island Council on the Arts in 2002, and he is a contributing editor for The American Poetry Review, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Slope, and Web del Sol. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, he currently teaches at Providence College in Providence Rhode Island, where he resides with his wife and two sons.

About Eduardo & "I":

Peter Johnson's poems are their own universe, fashioned by a crafty storyteller whose dramatis personae wander in and out of existential crises cast as vaudevillian antics. Sometimes funny beyond endurance, Eduardo & "I" is a hymn to the absurd, a fearful peek at history and, paradoxically, a lyric of the poet's family life.
— Jack Allman

Just when all seems lost, here comes Eduardo & "I," Peter Johnson's touching and hilarious ode to fame, obscurity, consumerism, myth, and reality. And this is no ordinary reality but a hyper-real mirage of metaphysical doubles wearing their best clothes and questioning our existence. Yet Johnson is ready for all interrogators and stands with Poe, Borges, and Elvis ready to take them on.
— Maxine Chernoff

Meet Peter Johnson's Eduardo, a shady alter ego (or alter id), a post-PC bad boy, a spunky Jiminy Cricket gone delightfully awry. These poems fuse artifice and sincerity, rage and humility, golf balls and cosmic missiles to create an astonishingly funny yet serious book of prose poems, characterized by jovial cynicism and skeptical faith.
— Denise Duhamel

Eduardo & "I" is a radically subversive book, uncompromising, dour yet full of gratitude. Peter Johnson's clear-eyed explication of our sad, bruised, fallen world becomes a celebration, an elation. Johnson shouts, "Hallelujah!" in one of his poems. Read Eduardo & "I" and you'll be shouting it too.
— Gary Young

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