Matthew Johnstone appears in Issue 38 with two poems: Do not stare the ridge and Razor in the car, Please make it look like early morning. The surviving poems move through roads, fields, weather, animals, houses, voices, photographs, fire, water, and abrupt shifts of syntax. Their landscapes remain physical while continually opening into linguistic disturbance.
Do not stare the ridge
The first poem builds from fragments that seem to arrive from several kinds of language at once: observation, instruction, quotation, newspaper diction, private address, and dream. A ridge, a dog, rain, highway, geese, photographs, and fire become points in a rapidly changing field.
The poem explicitly addresses Jack Spicer, placing its fractured landscape near a tradition of dictation, interruption, and language arriving from beyond the stable lyric self. Readers interested in such formal disruption can continue through experimental poetry.
Razor in the car
The second poem is shorter and more visibly segmented. Fog, unincorporated land, a quarry, fields, trash bins, liquor, tractors, fish houses, bridges, and local names appear as isolated units whose relation depends on rhythm and recurrence.
The poem treats landscape as a sequence of charged details. Readers following the relation between fragment, spacing, and sequence can continue through poetic forms.
Place and dislocation
Johnstone’s two poems repeatedly name roads, houses, corners, fields, water, weather, and regional spaces while refusing the stability usually associated with descriptive landscape. Place becomes something heard, remembered, crossed, and linguistically rearranged.
This unstable geography has a useful neighboring route in Ken Rumble, whose work also brings geography, public history, sound, collage, and movement into poetic form.
Matthew Johnstone in contemporary poetry
The preserved Issue 38 publication establishes Johnstone within the wider field of contemporary poets working through fragment, landscape, quotation, associative image, and inherited literary voices.
Available biographical evidence for Johnstone is limited, so this profile remains centered on the two poems themselves and the formal world they make visible.