Poetry. With metaphoric dexterity and an uncanny ability to invigorate common expressions so that they become pure poetry, Nick Johnson writes his poems with skill and candor. The opening of each poem in Degrees of Freedom parts the sky with perceptual lightning, and by the time we finish, a devastating clap of truth's thunder rolls in, taking the poem and us by storm--Molly Peacock. Nicholas Johnson is a poet of incandescent wit, the kind of mordant intelligence whose first target is its own assumptions, and a strange haunted tenderness. I love his work for its dark, sotto voce originality. This is a collection that the writing community has been waiting for-Dennis Nurkse. Nicholas Johnson's poetry has been published in Poetry London, Poetry Wales, American Poetry Review, Shenandoah, American Letters & Commentary, The Journal, Pivot, and the 1997 Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry.