The King of Terrors, Jim Johnstone

Coach House Books, 2023

Jim Johnstone’s The King of Terrors is a poetic telling of how illness and a close encounter with death can make us strange to ourselves and to the world. The book offers a chance to see our lives anew, even the things we regret. The poems dance between accepting death and hoping for a second chance to do it all again. As the poet says, “the future is as certain / as the body / it inhabits / and multiplies rapidly.”

—Courtney Bates-Hardy, Regina