King of Terrors by Jim Johnstone

Graceful, sculpted poems that investigate mortality and look for
answers in love, friendship, and art.
Written after a brain tumour diagnosis early in the pandemic, The King of
Terrors is a meditation on living with illness and the forces required to heal.
These forces are not always what we expect – they may not even be medical.
Johnstone implies that language, relationships, and our immersion in the
natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse. Haunted
by the anxiety of living in a polarized society and during the climate crisis,
Johnstone’s poems are bodily reflections that ask how we can reframe our
past to rouse the present. The King of Terrors oscillates between the personal
and the public, the clinical and the spiritual, so we’re never quite sure what
we are seeing, no matter how familiar.
‘The King of Terrors is a luminous meditation on the otherworld of illness
and treatment, contemplating the mysteries of death and the frontiers of
mind and body with sharp clarity and radical vulnerability. These mesmerizing, urgent poems admit us not only to waiting rooms and brain scans, but
also to the intimate fears that accompany the estranging experience of being
unwell, or, as the poet says, living “between / age and agency.” Haunting,
stark, and lyrical, The King of Terrors is charged, as all the best poetry is, with
the shock of the mortal.’ – Sarah Holland-Batt, author of The Jaguar
‘There is a moving, fierce intensity to The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone
knowingly reminds us that betrayals of the body are also betrayals of language,
“each bloody / mouthful a sentence fragment.” These are lines of admission,
ambition, and harrowing truth, and Johnstone – despite a future only as
certain “as the body // it inhabits” – offers a form of redemption, for the
fortitude of the sick, for poetry itself.’
– Randall Mann, author of Deal: New and Selected Poems
Credit: Erica Smith

Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of
seven collections of poetry including The Chemical Life, which was shortlisted for
the 2018 ReLit Award. Johnstone has also won several awards including the Bliss
Carman Poetry Award, a CBC Literary Award, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize,
the Robin Blaser Award, and Poetry’s Editors Prize for Book Reviewing. Currently,
he curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Palimpsest Press, where he published
The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. 

ISBN 978 1 55245 470 1
5.5 x 8.5, 96 pp. | pbk
$22.95 CDN | $17.95 US
POE023010 POETRY / Subjects & Themes /
Death, Grief, Loss
EPUB 978 1 77056 780 1