The Death Jazz is a collection of poems and short stories clustered around the character of Joe Oroborus, a hapless 21st-Century everyman who works a regular job and dreams of being the All Being. Written over the course of five years, the book was conceived in the spirt of Surrealist revolt, Dadaist subversion and good old American ingenuity. Alex S. Johnson's influences cross an esoteric spectrum, from Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, T.S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca and Walt Whitman to Michael McLure, Philip Lamantia, Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, Charles Bukowski, Scandinavian heavy metal and gangsta rap.