Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms

Poetry. STUDY IN PAVILIONS AND SAFE ROOMS is an exploration of public and private space at their extremes. Borrowing titles from state-planned exhibition halls and panic rooms built for riding out the approaching apocalypse, these poems stage collisions of aesthetics, politics, and history in artificial environments. These poems are phenomenological investigations gone awry under the sway of unruly and contradictory forces. "Smart, elusive, like Debussy's Nuages , crossed with Ashbery's Three Poems —a stately Happening, where Stockhausen drops by to dish. Paul Foster Johnson uses syntax as a friend, a chaperone, a punching it keeps him—and his happy reader—in a sequestered, cozy space of detente and narcosis. Reading these taut, architectural poems, I feel like I'm figure-skating on Bauhaus ice; thus Johnson gives us a sexually ambiguous, cerebral map of how to write a poem today"—Wayne Koestenbaum.