Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security

You're better off not sitting down and reading these all at once—but absorbing them slowly, like a tasty cup of coffee in the morning. . . . The award-winning poet covers a diverse range of territory, including many timely subjects such as political division and diversion, sexuality, marriage, parenting and religion.

— Ray Walsh, Lansing State Journal

Brad Johnson’s wry, wise (and often weirdly funny) poems capture our American mayhem as it whizzes by, including his sweet poems about family, shaped by the magic realism of South Florida. A real find.

— John Balaban, former judge for the National Book Award for Poetry

Brad Johnson’s narratives bristle with encounters as indelible as our own unsettled memories. Alert to loss and ambushed by beauty, he offers up the cultural moment “as if history’s a thing happening all at once.” A critic, a comic, and a seeker, Johnson celebrates and rues the way we live now.

— Jody Bolz, editor emeritus of Poet Lore and author of Shadow Play and A Lesson in Narrative Time

Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security tells us that tricks can be played on the eyes and ears and heart in plain sight. Brad Johnson is a trickster, a comic acerbic with a heart that is pliable and always ready to break for humanity.

— Fred D’Aguiar, author of Translations from Memory and Children of Paradise

The dramatis personae of Brad Johnson’s lively poems debate the hot-button issues of the day—from politics and religion and sex to consumerism and popular culture—and readers will find themselves actively joining the conversation. With his roots in Dylan and the Beats, Johnson writes a contemporary protest poem, shrewdly ironic toward the hypocrisies and sanctimonies of our digital, viral age. Funny and freewheelingly associative, these poems track the daily trials of suburban marriage and parenting, reporting like bulletins from the front.

— Peter Schmitt, author of Country Airport, Hazard Duty, and Renewing the Vows