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Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of the poetry collection Red Summer, selected by Carl Phillips as winner of the Dorset Prize. Educated at Howard University and Cornell, he received Pushcart nominations as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. Johnson teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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Ars Poetica as Phrenology

or Phrenology as Ars Poetica

by Amaud Jamaul Johnson
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So here’s the bit, my shtick,
To make my mouth a miliary,

To wade through this muddy
Morphology, to get all buck


And wing, volley those notes
Into the spotlight and sing. O,


My hippocampus is hawkish.
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  • This poem is like a dance--I can even hear the slow...

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