MM12 Available Now!

Misunderstandings Magazine #12 is hot off the presses, and I’ve finally recovered from the launch last Thursday night at The Central. A big thanks to Edward Nixon for featuring us at his livewords reading series.

Here’s a sneak peak at one of the poems in the issue – Melanie Pierluigi’s Slow Paralysis:
 

I watch you pull  

the ocean from its frame. 

Watch the rise and fall of air 

as it falls from your chest 

like small moths.

Each wing pulls at the pinioned sky 

like stars that blink once and suddenly 

stop moving. A slow paralysis. 

The way you sit in a room 

but are never seen. Or when 

I’m pulled along by the slow velocity 

of your voice. The skeletal presence 

of looking through cracks and finding 

only burnt stones, left-over words, the hollow curve  

in my voice where  

you use to fit.

 

Besides MP, MM12 includes an interview with Patrick Lane as well as new poems from Shane Neilson, Lindsay Tipping, Natalie Zina Walscots etc. Send me an email at misunderstandings.magazine@gmail.com if you’d like a copy!

 

TVOE Reviewed

The Mansfield Revue has posted a review of my first book, The Velocity of Escape, penned by Evie Christie. EC writes:

“I first read Johnstone’s work in The Invertebrate Poems (which took second prize in the CBC Poetry Competition this year), and while I was particularly impressed with these poems, I wasn’t disappointed with the poet’s earlier work. Part of Guernica’s First Poets Series, this is another slim volume, a mere 51 pages — most of them entertaining, erotic, and dangerous, and at times brute in their clean, heart-wrenching details. Johnstone’s gift is the quiet, understated handling of his characters and material, the subtle aggression and joy that will likely be overlooked by those who are used to more a bombastic approach.”

For the full review, click.