The third in a trilogy of poetry collections that began with Dog Ear (2014) and continued with The Chemical Life (2017), Infinity Network is a spare, sculpted, and devastating collection that fearlessly explores the outermost range, reverb, and implications of identity politics and techtopia as pale substitutes for human vitality and interdependency. Stylistically connected to the trilogy’s two previous collections (exploring the nature of decay, and mental illness and addiction), Johnstone’s voice is unmistakable, and his commitment to exploring the depths of human experience as an extension of language itself under pressure recalls Adrienne Rich’s words on psychic and cultural disequilibrium: “It takes some strength of soul — and not just individual strength, but collective understanding — to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.”
Unflinching in its pursuit of a force more substantive and sustaining than echoic nothingness, Infinity Network bears up sublimely under the weight of its own credulousness and apocalyptic desolation with the invocation of ancient mythology and bodily marking in the opening poem, “The Ouroboros,” which dramatizes tattooing as an act of violence (“the black gasp sucks back into the gun, / paint / circling / the barrel’s darkening / mouth”) that allows the speaker to repossess agency over the body and the public, private, virtual, and civic spaces this uncompromising work inhabits.
How does one live an authentic life in an era characterized by calculating hubris (monopolistic capitalism, neoliberal expansion), bad faith, and a denial of the very limits (temporal, spatial, material, and terrestrial) that make life sensible, participatory, and worth living? As German philosopher Byung Chul-Han states in The disappearance of rituals, the neoliberal dispotif is characterized by narcissism, the disenchantment of art, auto-exploitation, the profanation of culture, and, in a miasma of endless addition and accumulation of the same, an excess of positivity, information and communication, and the loss of closure. This loss of boundaries, sites, and ritualized closure is what, Han writes, globalization needs to dissolve in order to accelerate the circulation of capital and commodities, yet its consequences are dire and vast: “Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. Without them, we slip through … or remain infantile consumers who never become adults,” in the vacuum of autonomous time.
Johnstone understands this crisis acutely. His collection is anchored by the motif of walls, both as limits and closure, as an attempt to cognitively and physically map our territories and bodies. “The Mirror Wall” (a bleeding title) opens with a Whitmanian reference, “contains multitudes,” and, from “The Ouroboros (Reprise)”:
Here’s the city. Here’s the empty pool, the chorus
of commuters
making their way
to the wall
walled in
while infusing a wound.
The wall
is an emptying —
a city block
upturned
to shake
exact and endless onlookers
off the paint,
the pavement.
The wall defines our lack of sovereignty.
Later in this poem, the same walls are “oxygenating walls,” and “a whisper campaign,” then at the poem’s end, “You’ve reached the wall / written on the wall once / you reach / the ocean.” Sovereignty alludes to the postmodern dissolution of nation-states, as well as echoes the collection’s opening poem, wherein marks, cuts, and boundary demarcations are sought psychically and physically by the speaker in order to establish personal autonomy within a sociopolitical order founded on surveillance and control.
Johnstone has a gift for both defining the malaise (“The pride / of urban-based evolution,” unfreedom in a post-truth age, ahistoricity, and a post-9/11 erasure of boundaries and consent), as well as offering legible means, however harrowing, of overcoming: “A bloodletting / to end all bloodlettings” (from “The Three-Day Blood Drive Begins”); the making of “restitutions” (from “Post-Truth”); and the recognition of names, “the source of my ID,” in “Headphones,” spliced with outside voices. These sources of possible “gospel” or “glory,” or even just mere survival and continuance, are woven into the book as an apologia for human existence, amid references to a landscape otherwise driven by technocratic detritus: screens, porn, and lenses.
It takes courage to face a social problem, as Johnstone hauntingly does. Many of these poems engage with critique and corrective through visual and spatial metaphors, such as the poem “Trompe L’Oeil,” which rhetorizes “The problem.” And, from “Identity as an Infinity Mirror”: “The first cut is a cure — / skin seamed / and re- / seamed / like the sleeve / of a wedding dress.”
In “Performance Anxiety,” a poem invoking the kinetic fissures between the writing self, the performative self, and the world, the speaker commands the reader to “Be still — / you’re witnessing my first time.” And we are, compelled by these razor-sharp poems that invert spectacle and spectatorship into a relationship between reader and author function (if following Foucault’s constructivist logic). One gets the sense, to wit, that the speaker, invested as they are in exposing the discursive seams behind our performative “selves,” is actually on a mission to break the machine itself, with surprisingly vulnerable moments such as “I’m as alive as you are,” and “Tabs clear and we share a common language.”
Whether one believes current world affairs are due to post-humanist expanding consciousness, partisan tribalism, or the end times, Johnstone implicates the reification of identity as a wormhole in a hotel window, echo chamber, infinity mirror, reproducible method, and spell with accuracy, and the all-too-real consequences this “increasingly effortless hell” have historically wrought, by way of anomie, alienation, and isolation. Johnstone reflects back to us our data, monologues, and negative feedback loops as a means of awakening us, “wolves in wolves’ clothing,” out of the existential ouroboros we’ve created, and which he formally enacts with breathtaking elan, championing instead our shared existence and poetry’s deictic powers of place- and self-making, “Here. / And here,” and ushering us into a brave new dawn by subversion of the panopticon gaze: “Take my photograph so I can disappear.”
[Published on September 1, 2022 by Vehicle Press/Signal Editions, 78 pages, $16.95 paperback]