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
Sara Eliza Johnson is the author of Vapor and Bone Map, which was a winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series. Her poetry has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Pleiades, the Best New Poets series, Salt Hill, Cincinnati Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day program, among other venues. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, two Winter Fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a residency from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Johnson is an assistant professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
Praise for Vapor “These poems touch the wound, touch the
fraying edges of the universe with curious, tender fingertips. They
touch with a shadowed tenderness, one of the most intimate kinds,
one that rises out of, translates, and transfers the original
touch.”—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe
"[Johnson’s Vapor] engages deeply with the universe—from the
infinitesimal to the cosmic, from the objective to the
subjective—and makes plain that the devastation inherent to living
is ubiquitous, necessary, even beautiful. In powerful, lyric
language, Johnson challenges the reader to explode, implode, and
shape-shift through pain and suffering."—Colorado Review“[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"In Vapor, Sara Eliza Johnson’s remarkable poems
detail the pressures of survival, and the horrors of it. They reach
for the edges of darkness—from the abyssal plains of the sea and
extremes of exoplanets—in search of debridement and mathematical
truth, for a vapor with the anatomy of a shame. These gorgeous,
lyric poems find their inspirations in science, but Johnson does
more than that. She can find the pulse in a fossil, the wind
trapped in a glacier. Johnson's primordial poems have an urgent
message: a reminder that it’s never too late to be alive."—Traci
Brimhall
"I concur: in reading Sara Eliza Johnson's Vapor, 'My body is
wrapped in honey. When I step outside / I become fire.' I become
air in the cells of these elegies for the eternal. Impossibly
visceral, these poems peel back epidermis and discover a field of
fever, unlock a nebula from a lilac, and find an altar for one's
head, in wind whirling at the speed of light. Each poem illuminates
the volition and velocity of violence, and each poem is a rebirth.
No one writes like Johnson."—Phillip Williams
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
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