Vapor

Reviews / Votes

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