Evoking the spirit of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs de Mal, Alex Johnson’s The Flowers of Doom whips together imagery from various sources to craft its near-apocalyptic nightmare and warning visions.

References from modern cosmology, Greek mythology, Biblical mythology, modern music, and news headlines and social issues blur together in these vivid lines. Johnson pays tribute to artists he respects, including Baudelaire, Ellyn Maybe, Kafka, and Jordan Gallader, by incorporating their imagery or through direct poem dedications. A common thread among those he admires is the ability to look at times of change with a mixture of awe and repulsion.

Poems at the beginning and end of the collection directly address current social ills such as environmental destruction, authoritarianism, racism, war, genocide, and religious hypocrisy. “Cat on a Hot Tin Horror Cast,” a relatively optimistic piece for this collection, urges the world’s people to sidestep their leaders and directly work to oppose mass murder and fight together for peace. “The Fire Anyway” champions unjustly maligned and marginalized people through the resilient character of Lilith while lambasting colonialism and the devastation of people and the planet.

Other poems in the middle fill out the collection with techno-futuristic, fairy tale, gothic, or rock-and-roll aesthetics. Some motifs recur, such as powerful and sensual femininity (the goddess Aurora in “Aurora’s Roar Against Death,” Aurelia in “Darker Matters,” and a nameless and original figure in “I Myself am Strange and Unusual”) and off-kilter musical references (“slay bells” in “Living Fast and Surveilled,” "St. Johnny Ramone” in “Radio Free Calaveras”).

The Flowers of Doom by Alex Johnson is a worthy read for its layered sensibilities as well as its messages.

The collection is forthcoming from Plasma Press in an omnibus edition with Thunderstruck by Alex Johnson and Sandy DeLuca.