Now and Then: Selected Longer Poems by J. Chester Johnson

The journey through "Now and Then" begins with an interracial murder in Arkansas along the Mississippi River Delta at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and ends in a martyrdom of the German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, at the Flossenburg concentration camp near the end of World War II. In between, a long dead and fabled father reappears for a delayed conversation with the poet, and a paean resurrects the transformational prophet, Martin Luther King, Jr.; a New York City riot of the 1960s impels the poet into the authenticity of the lower Eastside, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Lazarus and Jonathan Daniels chant their way into history; home and exile surprisingly have much more in common than a reader would normally believe.