Brad Johnson’s poems deal with life in all its messiness with short bursts of humor and dark tragedy. Life has given Johnson much fodder to slowly chew through and digest and redirect into thought-provoking poetry. He dreams of what Bob Dylan may be searching for while the monkey he meets at the end of a pier dreams of catching “The Big One.” In “Rethinking John” he tackles the issue of suicide with tenderness and insight. “Racist” takes us into the classroom with him and explores the attitudes of students toward racism in all its myriad forms and confusions in this politically correct world, and causes us to question our own position on this topic in his lines, “A white man approaching a black family./A black man approaching a white family.” He speaks tenderly of his wife and children in many of his poems marveling at their persistence to tackle life. He takes the American Dream of buying a house in The Happiness Theory, and fractures that noble ideal when he says, “Owning a house seemed like a dream./Now it’s just another job./None of my projects are finished./The bathroom should be retiled.” His poems are gentle bites at the world.