"If, as it has been claimed, the satirist is a left-handed writer, the analogy seems made for Kent Johnson's inimitable, fearless and much needed contribution - the one-in-ten, or more like one-in-a-thousand corrective, antidote, ballast, counterpoint, to the worst excesses and insincerities of western poetry's decadence and pomposity. In Nuper Verba - the Latin title is apposite - he takes aim at poetry's postures of antagonism, even as it drains the last best wine and lounges on a mouldering couch of bursaries. Truth-sayer or holy fool, insider's outsider or witnessing spirit, the moral...