Poetry. LGBT Studies. STUDY IN PAVILIONS AND SAFE ROOMS is an exploration of public and private space at their extremes. Borrowing titles from state-planned exhibition halls and panic rooms built for riding out the approaching apocalypse, these poems stage collisions of aesthetics, politics, and history in artificial environments. These poems are phenomenological investigations gone awry under the sway of unruly and contradictory forces.

"Smart, elusive, like Debussy's Nuages, crossed with Ashbery's Three Poems—a stately Happening, where Stockhausen drops by to dish. Paul Foster Johnson uses syntax as a friend, a chaperone, a punching bag: it keeps him—and his happy reader—in a sequestered, cozy space of detente and narcosis. Reading these taut, architectural poems, I feel like I'm figure-skating on Bauhaus ice; thus Johnson gives us a sexually ambiguous, cerebral map of how to write a poem today."—Wayne Koestenbaum

Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA

Paul Foster Johnson's first collection of poetry, REFRAINS/UNWORKINGS, was published by Apostrophe Books, and his second, STUDY IN PAVILIONS AND SAFE ROOMS, was published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the author of the g-o-n-g press chapbook Quadriga. His poems have appeared in The Awl, Jacket, Cannot Exist, GAM, EOAGH, FENCE, and Octopus. From 2003 to 2006, he curated the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place. He is an editor at Litmus Press and lives in New York.

Reviews and Other Links
Michael Slosek: The Poetry Foundation staff's favorite books of 2011