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…mehr
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.
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.
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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
