gatekeeper
Winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry
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.
–joey mcgarvey, senior editor
“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 can only be described as oneself. Gatekeeper stood out among a strong group of finalists for its focus, suspense, and intense interrogation of its subject matter. A deeply engaging and intelligent book, and a thoroughly enjoyable one.”
–Khaled Mattawa, juror
“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
“In this impressive and formally versatile debut, Johnson places the lyric in dialogue with a host of nonpoetic forms, among them diagrams, numbered lists, and maps. ‘It’s different in the lab; dissection is bloodless,’ he warns early in the collection. Johnson frames beauty and transcendence as a source of authority equal to the language of formal scientific inquiry. ‘Speak from a place of reversibilities,’ he advises, as though describing the poems’ own provocative movements between types of discourse. Johnson’s strength lies in his ability to reflect on his own unexpected juxtapositions and wild associative leaps: ‘The dream has not only shown me history in reverse but somehow changed it,’ he writes. Johnson calls attention to his own agency in inhabiting language, ‘In this moment I realize I have a level of control,’ framing his practice as a poetics of intervention. The work is filled with self-aware poems like this one, which reflect on their own philosophical underpinnings, and Johnson’s formal experimentation compliments the poems, involving and implicating the reader in their critique of linguistic hierarchies. ‘The individual becomes invisible,’ he observes, positioning the reader as collaborator and coconspirator in this thought-provoking collection.”
–Publishers Weekly, starred review
“These fascinating poems rest on the assumption that each of us, like the speaker, has two selves: one that occupies space in the ‘real’ world and another that exists only in a movie that plays ad infinitum 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 many selves, via something every bit as mysterious as nuclear fission, is mesmerizing. Even addicting, like a computer game you play while wishing the computer were a person. And then it becomes a person. And you wonder, How did that happen? If you have a computer you should read this book. ‘I am small and live in a chamber,’ the speaker says. Yes, the reader thinks, everything true for you is also true for me.”
–mary jo bang
"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. His one dull pulse of light in this nightmare world is Anon, a nameless and faceless entity whom he loves despite his own incredulity. Can you love something despite its lack of corporeality, can you love an idea as much as its incarnation? Our narrator desperately tries to maintain his sanity as a computerized reality begins to eclipse his human sensibilities. He begins to exist in a state of refreshing and reloading, becoming desensitized to the false light of the screen. The internet is a hellscape of impossible endings, an overwhelmingly violent arena where Anon flits and appears like some unknowable god. Our narrator attempts to fight digital infinitude with science—reminding himself of the natural world and things more mortal, and yet finds himself admitting to his friend/lover that he loves what is essentially a cyber ghost. 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
“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. Prose-poetic pages offer intermittent, dramatic scenes that create a narrative through-line for the book: the narrator, curiosity piqued by the possibilities of the hidden and deep web, begins searching and stalking that space. Johnson’s vision here is a world that we all dabble in–at the least the surface of it, on which these very words are being read–but Johnson pushes us lower, invites us in, and wonders what would help when we follow this medium to its logical (or illogical) conclusion. ‘We talk for months without exchanging names,’ the narrator says of his relationships with Anon, a phantom voice, a source of distant intrigue. Johnson takes on a breakneck feel in the book, and when he steps out from the online space, as in poems like ‘black mirror (slowly),’ the dystopia remains. Even though the narrator takes a break from the computer, he longs for a return: ‘This desire, an impulse, undoes me.’ Is this digital love? Gatekeeper offers uncomfortable possibilities.”
–Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions, Must-read Poetry: December 2019
“The hidden web. The dark web. Whatever you choose to call it, it’s full of the darkest and depraved parts of society. The world seems like an endless resource for criminals and psychopaths. After all, who else would be interested in a world with those kinds of resources–but what happens when an average person joins the scene? Gatekeeper, Patrick Johnson’s debut collection of poetry, explores that question, following an unnamed speaker down the digital rabbit hole where he falls deeper and deeper to a point where his involvement goes beyond reason. Then the question turns into, what happens when they can’t break away from the scene? When their life begins to revolve around it?”
–Julia Service, Call Me [Brackets]
“Gatekeeper started as poems in terza rima about the internet and became a book of lyric poems and short essays, with instant messenger chat logs, an internet love story. . . . With this book I wanted to make C. D. Wright’s ‘telegenic war’ an internet war, to descend into its inferno and imagine what could be.”
—from Library of America
“In the poem “war (back-and-forth)” Johnson foregrounds the physical nature of an internet text space, even including the shapes of the cursors in his text, while also drawing on the space as a metaphor. “Experience the split screen of the self: a masked figure below an all-reflective surface,” the poem’s speaker writes. “Speculate what ‘actually happened.’ | Unbox that imaginative zone.”
—Linda falkenstein, “Parallel worlds,” isthmus
Cover: Adam Ferriss, Finding Inspiration for Art in the Betrayal of Privacy (detail), 2016