Gatekeeper: Poems

by Patrick Johnson, Khaled Mattawa (Selected by)

Overview

A prize-winning poetry collection that delves into the dark wood of the digital underworld: “Impressive . . . thought-provoking.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

What is the deep web? A locked door. A tool for oppression and for revolution. “An emptying drain, driven by gravity.” And in Patrick Johnson’s Gatekeeper—selected by Khaled Mattawa as the winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—it is the place where connection is darkly transfigured by distance and power.

So we learn as Johnson’s speaker descends into his inferno, his Virgil a hacker for whom “nothing to stop him is reason enough to keep going,” his Beatrice the elusive Anon, another faceless user of the deep web. Here is unnameable horror—human trafficking, hitmen, terrorism recruitment. And here, too, is the lure of the beloved. But gone are the orderly circles of hell. Instead, Johnson’s map of the deep web is recursive and interrogatory, drawing inspiration and forms from the natural world and from science, as his speaker attempts to find a stable grasp on the complexities of this exhilarating and frightening digital world.

Spooky and spare, Gatekeeper is a striking debut collection and a suspenseful odyssey for these troubled times.

“These fascinating poems rest on the assumption that each of us has two selves: one that occupies space in the ‘real’ world and another that exists only in a movie that plays continuously at the back of our minds. With our hands on a computer keyboard, we have a third, cyborg, self. The poetic enactment of the splitting of these multiple selves is mesmerizing.” —Mary Jo Bang

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571317148
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	85
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Patrick Johnson earned his MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis and completed his undergraduate at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently studying to become a physician assistant, and lives in Madison.

Read an Excerpt

west (American)

the doubt
a scared child
slipping into bed
with me


From the parking lot we see it, blue;
first just the blue, like the single stroke of a brush
on a piece of china, the rest of its scene idyllic, but no,
just this single stroke. And then, through the trees,
on a branch, it takes a shape we all know: bird,
the word iridescent between our teeth.
When we were younger, we never imagined
feeling this way, which is to say we still feel alone,
not knowing how to spend our days, but already
we look into the mirror and think that we are
too young to have to see the skin around our eyes
hang down. When we were younger, we thought
that by this time we would have more to say
when we saw this bird, to speak its plastic beauty,
to know what it’s for. Instead we stand, look, and
after a moment approach it. We don’t want to scare it
away, but we want to get close. Our desire to see
is unanimous. It stands there, a practical machine
in repose, about to course into action. Steps closer
and we see its wings shellacked, pneumatic.
This is it, we think, seeing something capable of flight
here, seemingly displayed for us. Somewhere
we learned about the speckled eggs of a songbird,
how another species of bird lays similar eggs
in another bird’s nest, so she is made to think
the hatchling is her own. Maybe this is one of them,
maybe this bird is sitting in a nest. It does not sing,
or call us away, but we see a patch around its beak,
a place where the skin is pocked and bare, black
like the face of the mountain. We see a patch
where feathers have come loose around its eyes.
Now we see the bird’s face. It’s covered in small mites
that move slow and total, so that we can hardly see,
through the mites, its black eye. The thing stares back,
and its stare could be anyone’s.

***

empath (committed)

proof that to save it
condemn it—
one is healthy and sane
one is diseased and mad
one sees the other
through infected eyes
∆ the cure is disease itself


Empath (17:27:35): reading this is just another reminder of how i don’t and will never feel like i deserve you

Anon1 (17:27:42): do you wanna talk

Empath (17:28:51): sure

Empath (17:28:59): as a warning, i feel really emotional right now.

Empath (17:29:09): and you’re probably going to ask me about it and it’s going to be hard for me to tell you about it.

Anon1 (17:29:31): do you want to think about it first

Anon1 (17:29:34): and then type it out?

Empath (17:29:41): yeah

Empath (17:29:46): thanks

Empath (17:33:21): idk

Empath (17:35:41): i’m feeling upset by the chart and the rape forums while thinking about how much better of a person you are than me, and how i think i love you, and how i feel like i don’t deserve those things when there are people being experimented on in warehouse 3. i mean i knew but i didn’t know.

Anon1 (17:36:02): sorry

Empath (17:36:23): don’t be sorry

Anon1 (17:36:51): i haven’t shown anyone with a real emotional capacity so i wasn’t expecting that

Empath (17:37:01): i wasn’t expecting it either

Empath (17:37:41): when you tell me things like this, it’s this reminder that there’s so much about you that i don’t know. and i don’t feel the same because i feel like you know everything about me.

Anon1 (17:37:53): that’s part of it though, getting into a person’s head as a way of showing how much we don’t know beyond the surface.

Anon1 (17:38:03): i’m just saying it’s a way of making that apparent

Anon1 (17:38:09): you’re doing important things too

***

research (uncirculated)

what a moon
will do
to know
like we want to
but shine on one side


They’ve compiled all the data and studied the state of your face:
after the water (Figure 1);
when you prove their hypothesis (Figure 2);
after you have gone without food (Figure 3).

Your hair like an eleventh hour.

For once I can hear death’s delegation, coughing, arrive.

If you could tell us, what would you say:
that the worst was when they diagrammed you starting to fear air?
or the video—the liquid in your mouth,
when the water was a rabid dog, a stretch of fire?

Then you’re their image in some corner of the web.

Is this what made me come to envy you?

You’re so far from me.

I can’t take my eyes off you. I can’t take my eyes off you.

***

darkness (aroused)

i have left
a trace:
IMG_140305_0024
march4.png
X.jpg


When I sleep, a beam of darkness projects my data
onto the night sky, visible to those who can see
these projections with certain cells in their retina.
I don’t completely understand it. Unlike the absence
between stars, this darkness is actively seen,
in the way the black coloring of a caterpillar
can be more remarkable than its green and white stripes.
My entire body and mind: every time I turn,
a new facet of me becomes available to them;
with the curve of my spine, the figures of my dreams,
all of my thoughts—there’s a perfect image of me
that I will never see. Most seem to be researchers,
so to them I’m just a case study, but some users
are there to browse. It’s scary how much I imagine them
doing next to nothing with me. Often I can only fall
asleep knowing that it might be the time of year
when, after cleaning up dinner and walking to the terrace,
Anon, my one and only, can see me.

Table of Contents

Contents

façade (convincing)
viewer (exacting)
law (careful)
west (american)
logic (always)
empath (committed)
love (ledger)
beloved (made-up)
pursuit (vestibular)
black mirror (slowly)
war (inside)(beloved)
wake (systemic)
research (uncirculated)
opening (patent)
treason (suspect)
the name anon (inevitable)
interstices (longed-for)
transubstantiation (awol)
war (verifiable)
freedom (recourse)
shield (expected)
war (back-and-forth)
fantasy (doggy)
people here (distanced)
darkness (aroused)

Notes
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

11/18/2019

Kortemeier’s lyrical debut takes its title from the Japanese word for “do your best” and offers a travelogue of world historical sites. Poems drift from Hiroshima to Ground Zero, Stonehenge to Machu Picchu, sifting remnants, describing objects that are cordoned off or displayed under glass, recording snippets of Japanese and German, and registering limits and regrets: “The tiki head I brought back from New Zealand/ stands for no one’s death in particular,/ no one’s particular face.” Elsewhere, the poet admits she cannot “remember a single face” of those with whom she climbed Mt. Fuji, nor does she remember if she asked her German host “about the war.” Failures of nerve and of memory send the poet “to rediscover” details from a tour of Auschwitz recorded in “the little notebook” she carried through Europe, but these efforts are always insufficient. “This is what comes of lonely planets and NPR,” she quips, equating “trying on blouses” with “trying on languages,/ temples, rice fields.” At times, it’s hard to distinguish the poet’s ready admissions of ignorance from reluctant claims of touristic innocence, which get her out of “having to explain what does not understand.” “When I speak, I transform,” the poet admits, almost giddy with the poetical possibilities of mistaken idioms and mispronunciations, but ultimately opting against a more ethically oriented poetics of witness as she strives to live up to the goal set by the book’s title. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Fragmented and fractured, Johnson pushes this book to its structural limits—and the result is a successfully jarring and disturbing collection. This is a book of the internet, and of our internal selves: of pursuit, lust, and a closing into the spirit." —The Millions

"Impressive and formally versatile . . . 'The individual becomes invisible,' [Johnson] observes, positioning the reader as collaborator and co-conspirator in this thought-provoking collection."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Gatekeeper is a book for the age of the cloud, a volume of poetry that is at once novelistic and intensely lyrical. Armed with Plato and Agamben and writing in a pliable style that suits his book’s various tones and narrative turns, Patrick Johnson probes the changing nature of selfhood in our time, how we've become utterly unknowable and vulnerably exposed, and how the body and its desires and yearnings are reeled toward something that only be described as oneself. Gatekeeper stands out for its focus, suspense, and intense interrogation of its subject matter. A deeply engaging and intelligent book, and a thoroughly enjoyable one.”—Khaled Mattawa

“This is an odyssey into the dark recess of the internet. Johnson’s speaker traverses the deepest horrors of the dark web, beasts that shouldn’t and wouldn’t have a platform if it wasn’t for the digital cage we have built for them . . . Our narrator desperately tries to maintain his sanity as a computerized reality begins to eclipse human sensibilities . . . This collection of startlingly unforgiving prose serves as a reminder and a warning of what we are allowing ourselves to become the further we move into the haunted cosmos of the internet. Selected by Khaled Mattawa as the winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Gatekeeper feels like a socially relevant distress signal, something to be enjoyed for its beauty but also respected for the size of its teeth.”—Aimée Keeble, Main Street Books (NC)

“In Patrick Johnson’s unsettling debut collection, Gatekeeper, we are taken into the online world of the dark web, where we watch as individuals seek out community despite the inherent facelessness of the platform. In these poems our nameless guide encounters another being known only as Anon, who in time past Emily Dickinson might have referred to simply as ‘Master.’ Observes our guide, ‘I have no sense of what’s at stake for me / The half-life of love et cetera.’ As Johnson ultimately proves, the limits on vulnerability are self-imposed and result in our deepest woundings. Gatekeeper unnerves even as it shines.”—Amy Quan Barry

“Gatekeeper’s subject is the permeable self, at once virtual and visceral. Patrick Johnson gathers shards of experience—online and off—into an unsettled and exceedingly contemporary portrait of love, obsession, danger, death, voyeurism, anxiety, guilt, paranoia, loneliness, and connection. Discarding the usual easy (and false) divisions, this is a book that expands outward as it stares deep within.”—Edward McPherson

“These fascinating poems rest on the assumption that each of us has two selves: one that occupies space in the ‘real’ world and another that exists only in a movie that plays continuously at the back of our minds. With our hands on a computer keyboard, we have a third, cyborg, self. The poetic enactment of the splitting of these multiple selves is mesmerizing.”—Mary Jo Bang

From the Publisher