The Chemical Life

An exploration of mental illness and addiction.

Praised for his darkly psychological accounts of extreme experiences, Jim Johnstone’s fifth book of poems explores his most difficult terrain to date: mental illness and addiction. Like Coleridge’s opium dreams, Johnstone’s narratives in The Chemical Life are hallucinatory, coloured by his use of both prescription and recreational drugs. Returning often to the notion of rival realities—“in everything, there is a second state”—Johnstone is brilliantly disruptive and disorientating; a poet whose savagely austere forms, electrically precise images and keyed-up rhythms reveal an obsession with the mind-altering properties of language itself.

Reviews

“images so visceral, primal – yet controlled – that they leave us disoriented, seeing double.” – Marcella Huerta & Tess Liem, Montreal Review of Books

In many ways, Johnstone is a mysterious poet. The inner world of his poems is full of strange associations and dreamlike successions of images. It is a bold, skillful sort of poetry, and it makes one curious what canyons he will attempt in the years to come. —University of Toronto Quarterly

Johnstone’s poetry is incredibly efficient; there are no wasted words. Both thematically and technically, there is a dirty edge to many of these poems, which gives them a raw and uncensored feel. —The New Quarterly