The Time Traveler

Finalist for the 2020 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest 

Charles Johnson’s THE TIME TRAVELER is an exploration of the after-effect of service in the Vietnam war as well as of African-American life and history in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is a delicately nuanced book that is unafraid to tell the truth about prejudice and violence so deeply ingrained in American society. 

These are poems of a good man who is trying to understand his own life and experience and to have us also understand. Wonderful! –Maria Mazziotti Gillan American book award winner Artist website mariamazziottigillan.com Poetry Website: mariagillan.com Poetry Blog: mariagillan.blogspot.com 

In this unforgettable little book, we meet a hurt kid who grows up black in white America. That kid becomes a man determined not to repeat a past that keeps happening. Charles H Johnson’s poems in THE TIME TRAVELER set us free to join him in the fight against the sin of American racism, from “a piece of Africa led chained / Across a Carolina auction block,” to the forces that continue to perpetuate “the Confederacy when it tried / And failed to unravel the United States.” —Sander Zulauf, Editor emeritus, Journal of New Jersey Poets