Lyndon Johnson

Jonathan Farmer is the author of That Peculiar Affirmative: On the Social Life of Poems. He teaches high school English, and he lives in Durham, North Carolina.

"Lyndon Johnson is the sort of poem I didn't think any living American had the ability and ambition to write, a long poem that coheres, brilliantly, rather than breaking into fragments held together only by its author's insistence that it's a single poem. Nor did I think anyone likely in this bad time to write a poem in which I could see the America I thought I saw as a child, though I was a Black child—an America at least imagining itself toward justice. Lyndon Johnson reminds one that American poetry, and America itself, can be more."—Shane McCrae "This book is WILD. I could not stop shaking my head and smiling as I read it. I am overwhelmed by the sheer formal stamina of this poem/story/historical reimagining (but also the research, the sheer magnitude of the knowledge here is stunning) of a story and a figure we thought we knew. I was vexed by this book. I was as angry at this book as I am with our country. And, like the country itself, I'm bowled over by the generosity and daring and deep intimacy of this poem."—Gabrielle Calvocoressi "Jonathan Farmer's wonderful book Lyndon Johnson attempts a poetic and historiographic feat whose ambition is somehow commensurate with its subject's: to capture (in verse?!) a great man of history and, in an era in which the Great Man is itself a charged and embattled concept, grapple with both its power and its fundamental absurdity. That he succeeds is almost as astonishing as the fact that the result is incredibly fun to read, a 'nonfiction poem' that will have you turning pages gleefully, inhaling the jaw-dropping details Farmer's uncovered."—Dan Kois