Poetry. "With metaphoric dexterity and an uncanny ability to invigorate common expressions so that they become pure poetry, Nick Johnson writes his poems with skill and candor. The opening of each poem in Degrees of Freedom parts the sky with perceptual lightning, and by the time we finish, a devastating clap of truth's thunder rolls in, taking the poem and us by storm"--Molly Peacock. "Nicholas Johnson is a poet of incandescent wit, the kind of mordant intelligence whose first target is its own assumptions, and a strange haunted tenderness. I love his work for its dark, sotto voce originality. This is a collection that the writing community has been waiting for"-Dennis Nurkse. Nicholas Johnson's poetry has been published in Poetry London, Poetry Wales, American Poetry Review, Shenandoah, American Letters & Commentary, The Journal, Pivot, and the 1997 Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Nicholas Johnson is CoFounder and Senior Poetry Editor of Big City Lit (nycBigCityLit.com), an online literary magazine. For the past three summers, he has co-organized a series of readings and workshops in juvenile detention facilities, at libraries, and elsewhere in rural Greene and Albany Counties. He has taught creative writing for many years at the Payne Whitney Clinic and The Lighthouse in New York City. Johnson's degrees include an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, and an ABD from the Catholic University of America.