Jeff T. Johnson
books
The Haze Pervades: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
10.01.09
During some of the long silences of Pynchon's career, it must have seemed he had disappeared for good. With his latest, we doubt it, as the Pynchon cartel reemerges to take on/revisit the best threads of his past works - The Lot cries for more. Jeff T. Johnson reviews Inherent Vice.
poetry
"Somewhere in this Book I Broke" -- a review of Mean Free Path by Ben Lerner
02.09.10
"If you have to buy a ticket, it's modern. If you are already inside and you have to pay to get out of it, it's more modern," writes Ben Lerner in his book Angle of Yaw, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award. He has followed it with his latest collection Mean Free Path. Taken from physics, its title refers to the average distance traveled by an electron between two successive collisions with other moving particles, an idea which -- along with the Doppler effect -- Lerner uses to explore 21st century distraction, the military industrial complex and love. Jeff Johnson reviews this ambitious new work.