[3][4] "White, White Collars" "Enough" "Night" "Heat" "The Boarding" "The Song" "The White Fires of Venus" "Nude" "Vespers" "The Story" "Surreptitious Kissing" "From A Berkeley Notebook" "On the Olympia" "A Woman" "Now" "Ten Month After Turning Thirty" "In a Light of Other Lives" "For Jane" "The Circle" "Sway" "The Woman in the Moon" "The Flames" "Minutes" "The Coming of Age" "You" "Poem" "Radio" "Tomorrow" "Confession of St. Jim-Ralph" John Casteen, writing in Voltage Poetry ranks The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems as one of Johnson's two literary "masterpieces", the other his short fiction volume Jesus' Son (1992).

Johnson's poetry works in quietly wrought, variously personal ways, emanating from what he might call 'the terror / of being just one person—one chance, one set of days.

[7] Poet Ray Deshpande of the Poetry Foundation notes that while Johnson was "adept across genres, writing plays and searing war reportage in addition to fiction, one finds a distinctive voice in his four short books of poems.

[12]Among those poems in the volume that succeed in making "the ordinary extraordinary" Miklitsch cites "Heat", "Enough", "At the Olympic Peninsula", "Ten Months After Turning Thirty" and "The Flames.

"[13] In the verse that forms "The Circus" Miklitsch locates Johnson's "poetic personality": …Johnson's work would be nothing without his sympathetic imagination...the speaker's involvement in the commonplace grief of other people, all the waitresses and bus drivers, drunks and refugees and school truants who people Hopper's paintings...illuminates the prosaic world in which men and women go doggedly about their dark lives of desperation.