BlazeVOX, paperback Publication Date: April 15, 2026 Publisher Marketing: In I’m Old, Not Dead, Peter Johnson’s poetry and prose bring a whole new glow to the City of Buffalo with his masterful storytelling. —Tom Fontana, Three-time Emmy Award Winner and Creator and Writer of Oz, Borgia, and Monsieur Spade Peter Johnson is a playful visionary. He sees things in places where most of us don’t know to look, and describes them in ways that create the world anew. —Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, and Low Peter Johnson has often been celebrated for his unmatched wit, dark humor, and command of the prose poem and short fiction, but his work as a prose stylist has also been lauded. In I’m Old, Not Dead Johnson gifts us a book of hybrid essays marked by unmistakable clarity, tenderness, and insight—essays that resemble verbal prisms that slow and bend the mundane into colorful revelations. What results is a profound book of seriocomic musings from the desk of a wise and aging poet. —Nin Andrews, author of Son of a Bird and the Book of Orgasms Armed with a sharp wit, an empathetic heart, and a knack for writing about the spectrum of life's teachable moments, Peter Johnson's book of essays offers up lessons we can all benefit from. —Luke Russert Emmy Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of Look for me There In Peter Johnson’s new book of hybrid essays both recognizable and uncategorizable genres are in constant argument, the result being playfully earnest, yet deadly serious and whimsical, all at the same time. Concerning Johnson’s prose poetic genius, poet Bruce Smith writes, “Johnson’s funny poems are heartbreaking, and his serious ones are hilarious”—an observation that also perfectly describes the essays in I’m Old, Not Dead. —Syd Lea, author of Such Dancing As We Can and The Blainville Testament Peter Johnson has been praised and awarded over his long career as a prose poet, a fiction writer, an essayist, and editor of significant anthologies, including his legendary The Prose Poem: An International Journal, which was partly responsible for a prose-poem renaissance in the 1990s. In his new book of hybrid, seriocomic essays, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet, Johnson combines prose poetry, flash fiction, and autobiography in his attempt to examine our current zany zeitgeist. As Johnson himself writes in his “Preface,” “Think of this collection as dispatches sent from the encampment of an aging humanist, who is baffled by, not to mention pissed off at, the unrecognizable intellectual and spiritually challenged world he is living in—a world of conspiracy theorists and conmen, a world where the grand narratives he’s embraced and playfully satirized over a lifetime are beginning to vanish faster than the working-class values he grew up with, a world where even his beloved ‘Literature’ seems threatened by ‘influencers’ and incessant self-promotion.” But behind such a harsh appraisal, lurks a cautious optimism fueled by Johnson’s comic approach to life and his sincere belief in an authentic humanism that demands we take care of each other no matter what level of pandemonium confronts us.
