Evolution’s Progress picks up where the author's first volume of poetry, Evolution’s Promise , left off. Both volumes utilize a specific philosophical launchpad, Integral—sometimes called Evolutionary—Theory, an emerging worldview that succeeds postmodernism by attempting to integrate all past major wordviews (including postmodernism), embracing the best in, and purging the defects from, all of them. Because Johnson treats poetry as an oral art form, he aims for a fluid sound that does not always find satisfactory expression on the printed page. One of the challenges is to resolve the tension between the need to craft the poem’s look on the page while being true to the sound.