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Sara Eliza Johnson’s much-anticipated second collection traces human emotion and experience across a Gothic landscape of glacial and cosmic scale.
With a mind informed by physics, and a heart yearning for sky burial, Vapor’s epic vision swerves from the microscopic to telescopic, evoking an Anthropocene for a body and planet that are continually dying: “So alone / I open like a grave,” Johnson chronicles her love for “all this emptiness, this warp and transparence, the whorl of atoms I brush from your brow,” and considers how “each skull, / like a geode, holds a crystal colony inside.”
Almost omnipresently, Vapor stitches stars to microbes, oceans to space, and love to pain, collapsing time and space to converge everything at once. Blood and honey, fire and shadow, even death and mercy are secondary to a profoundly constant flux. Facing sunlight, Johnson wonders what it would mean to “put my mouth to its / mouth, suck the fluid / from its throat, and give / it my breath, my skin, / which was once my / shadow,” while elsewhere the moon “is molten, an ancient red, and at its bottom is an exit wound that opens into another sea, immaculate and blue, that could move a dead planet to bloom.”
In Vapor, Sara Eliza Johnson establishes herself as a profound translator of the physical world and the body that moves within it, delivering poems that show us how to die, and live.
Praise for Vapor
“[Vapor is] a litany of cataclysm: nuclear or volcanic, Biblical or interstellar.The Anthropocene and post-apocalyptic are ubiquitous subjects in contemporary literature with entire genres rising to explore issues of climate crisis and the geopolitical issues inextricable from them, but there is something in Johnson’s poems that feels ‘at last a surprise.’”—Dark Mountain Project
Praise for Bone Map
“A brutal and beautiful book . . . Johnson’s exacting and muscular use of language and image, as well as the psychic environment she creates, makes every comfort provisional, therefore, believable. To engage with Bone Map is to take stock of our lives and our world, and to question the stories we tell ourselves about them.”—The Rumpus
“Johnson’s spare, versatile diction gives these slender poems the intractable grip of a sudden riptide. Each one vivisects its subject to better appreciate its force of beauty, its startling nature, with novel grace and curiosity.”—Shelf Awareness
“Bone Map makes words said, and heard, for the first time. Who believes that young poets cannot be Masters? Each poem is a new backdrop for matters of interest—mostly of love—new circumstances—sometimes surreal—each page an index of bright beautiful language.”—Washington Independent Review of Books
“Johnson’s poems, like light, clarify even as they pierce.”—Publishers Weekly
“The territory mapped in this gorgeous book—first a forest with animals, then water and winter ice—is wracked by violence, war, and loss, with the bones and viscera of the living and dead laying claim to our attention. But it is also a world of dream and vision: ‘All moments will shine if you cut them open,’ the poet says. And though the process is often brutal, as war edges toward apocalypse, then quiets to elegiac ache, a fierce beauty emerges, line by line, image by image, transforming darkness as well as light.”—Martha Collins
“Returning again and again to brute nodes of meaning—owl, deer, berry, blood, wound—Johnson guides us back into those primary symbols where the husk of human intelligence breaks apart, leaving only that shining germ that admits to basic needs: hunger, meaning, love, want. Poems of dark wonder result, calling back into the surface complexity of our daily lives those deeper realities of folklore and fairy tale, and the child’s astonished realization, that she is—as we are—both predator and prey.”—Dan Beachy-Quick
“Fierce and tender . . . A collection that continues on, to haunt and reorder human experience. A much earlier world lives in these poems, and our own sad time as well. Private and oddly not private at all in her mythic feel and often through brilliant riffs of metaphor, Johnson is careful about the deep silence in things, and her direction. Which is to say, this book is a map. Carry it with you. Then open it. Let it advise and scare you again and again.”—Marianne Boruch
“[Johnson’s] is a cunning and dangerous poetry, deceptive in its apparent innocence, not written against the dark backdrop of identifiable horrors, but drawn from a well of the beautiful and the macabre, a crystal cup of roses dipped in the tongueblood of wolves. In all, there is the mystic vision of wintry things first seen at the cusp of spring, not yet sorted into any commonplace order. For Johnson is a builder of miraculous worlds and not their devourer.”—Garrett Hongo
Planktonic Foraminifera
The Abyssal Zone
Gravitational Wave
Home
A Ctenophore’s Transmission
Kwiat Paproci
Legend
Amplituhedron
Amplituhedron
Amplituhedron
Amplituhedron
Combustion
Black Hole
Megatsunami
Fallout
Nebula
Pyroclast
Hadean
Vapor
Vapor
Vapor
Vapor
Vapor
Migration
Road to Explosion Area
Asteroseismology
Familiar
Wormhole
Ceremony
Coma
Terra Incognita
Titan
Titan
Titan
Exoplanet TrES-2 b
Exoplanet HD 189733b
Exoplanet Proxima Centauri b
Migration
Revelation
Lazarus
Mutant
Polydipsia
Migration
Geode
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES