SOURCE: McGuiness, Daniel. Review of Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson. Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 3 (summer 1993): 405-06.

In the following laudatory review of Jesus' Son, McGuiness finds a similarity between Johnson's verse and his short fiction.

Denis Johnson's career seems somehow geometrical, graphable, perhaps parabolic: the poems at the start, the novels in the middle, the short stories lately. Whether the parabola sweeps to an apogee or drops like your phoneline under the weight of snow is a matter of personal taste, but the line's start and stop do, nonetheless, figure into something like equilibrium. It's the same blighted landscape of addiction, reckless rock-and-roll love, and the benighted days of the American underclass that we return to in these new stories. It is perhaps no accident that Johnson's other work lately has been in journalism: quirky, apocalyptic reports from the civil war in Liberia and the recent American...