I'm A Man
Peter Johnson

128 pages - $15.00 ISBN 1-893996-69-7

October -- sample [PDF]

The colorful characters who populate these stories live in Buffalo, NY but they will be readily recognizable to everyone. These are blue collar men who work in the steel mills, and when those mills close, they do whatever they can to stay afloat on the
sea of anger created by the circumstances of their lives. They drink, they fight, they hang out in pool halls waiting for "something to develop," yet they are
in the truest sense heroic.

Peter Johnson is the founder and editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal. His books of prose poetry include Pretty Happy and Miracles & Mortifications, the latter of which won the James
Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, he currently teaches at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island.

"Peter Johnson's prose poems in Miracles &
Mortifications were what one would hope for from a
book that won the James Laughlin Award-energetically
inventive, surrealistically funny, and also enormously
entertaining. I'm A Man, Johnson's new book of stories
takes a different stylistic tack: the prose is
stripped down, sinewed with dialogue; the surreal
replaced by what we might call the hyperreal. The
compression of these stories comes not from figurative
language, but from Johnson's ability to go to the
heart of the matter; the comic edge-a given in
Johnson's work-is here no longer zany. In I'm A Man
what's funny costs failure and disappointment; what's
funny is also poignant. What this book has in common
with Johnson's poems is his insistence that a writer
get more down than craft, that a work of art also
entertain."
-Stuart Dybek

"Although most readers know Peter Johnson from his
prose poems, his fiction deserves just as much
attention. The stories in I'm A Man are linked by
their absolute accuracy in depicting the world of men,
the world of hard labor, and the collision between the
two. Think of Nathanael West's keen sense of the
absurd or William Kennedy's working class of Albany as
you encounter Johnson's offbeat characters from his
hometown of Buffalo, NY. You'll feel as if you're
cruising an American Legion bar with one of the
regulars."
-Joseph Monninger, author of New Jersey and Barn.

"Nobody knows the dark chemistry of family
relationships better than Peter Johnson. His starkly
crafted, evocative stories beat strong in the American
heart."
-Rodman Philbrick, author of Freak the Mighty and
The Last Book in the Universe