Vapor: Poems

(Paperback)

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Sara Eliza Johnsons much-anticipated second collectiontraces 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, Vapors 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.

Reviews

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
"[Johnsons Vapor] engages deeply with the universefrom the infinitesimal to the cosmic, from the objective to the subjectiveand 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 Johnsons poems that feels at last a surprise.Dark Mountain Project

"InVapor,Sara Eliza Johnsons remarkable poems detail the pressures of survival, and the horrors of it. They reach for the edges of darknessfrom the abyssal plains of the sea and extremes of exoplanetsin 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 its 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 . . . Johnsons 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

Johnsons 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 interestmostly of lovenew circumstancessometimes surrealeach page an index of bright beautiful language.Washington Independent Review of Books

Johnsons poems, like light, clarify even as they pierce.Publishers Weekly

The territory mapped in this gorgeous bookfirst a forest with animals, then water and winter iceis 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 meaningowl, deer, berry, blood, woundJohnson 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 childs astonished realization, that she isas we areboth 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

[Johnsons] 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

Author Bio

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.