“Mark Francis Johnson’s Can of Human Heat takes the traditional worldbuilding function of speculative writing and distorts it around its most far-flung, self-reflexive poles. It isn’t a book about a fantasy world or alternative timeline; it reads instead like the appendical traces of one sent back across dimensions — backstories, info-dumps, and other explanatory narrative niceties are dispensed with. At times hazily suggesting the romance involutions of Sidney's Old Arcadia, at times refashioning tropes of the fantasy or nautical adventure novel into a kind of absurdist underclass siege diary, Can of Human Heat presents a landscape that is neither utopian nor dystopian but instead something queerly sketched by an alien phenomenology. And yet within this damaged environment, Johnson has created a cast of characters that are part lumpen Candide and part Beckettian tramp — strangely likeable lifeforms manifesting an utter desensitization to the biological and ecological degradation whose consequences have totally altered them. In its paralogical epiphanies, Johnson's poem refashions classic modernist lyricism as high farce in which the comic intransigence of everyday objects extends even to the body — and to consciousness — itself.” -back cover, Golias Books

Johnson attended high school in Albuquerque and then worked intermittently at an Alaskan cannery before learning the ropes of the book trade at Endicott Booksellers on the Upper West Side and Powell’s Books in Oregon. He later studied linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He currently lives in Philadelphia, where he is an independent bookseller dealing in rare records and antiquarian books, and where he performs as DJ Hiding Place. Some of his mixes have been published by Gauss PDF and include extensive fake liner notes that very few people have noticed exist. He is the author of several titles, has also published under the pseudnym Oren Mabb and is a co-founder of Hiding Press.

Golias Books (Durham), 2017

5.25” x 7.75”

184 pages