Diary of a String

Author: Mark Francis Johnson

Publisher: Spiral Editions (2024)

In Diary of a String, Johnson offers the reader yet another beautifully psychedelic, at times hilarious, at times gut-wrenchingly sad snapshot of this constantly expanding and accreting universe. We amble through a flotsam of compacted late capital stratae of trash, universes of foreclosed possibilities, weird vegetables, persons and things assembled in the fucked desklight of gig economy "free time," genealogies of items, worlds, and characters defined by mishap and obscurity. All of this and more, etc., as the salesman would refrain—presented with a diction, syntax, and narrative architecture that all at once seems to ooze and move with generosity, possibility, and mutable unselfishness while exacting a sharp, crystalline method of meaning and representation. Everything is possible here, even beyond the horizon of the given story, even as the horizon of the story doubles and fractals recursively past the limits of what we hold to be true as story, as horizon, as possibility. "The / spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer," and we should all be so lucky that Johnson is able to record some of it for us to sample.

—Ted Rees