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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.
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Bone Map - Poems (Paperback)
Sara Eliza Johnson; Introduction by Martha Collins; Notes by Martha Collins
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R402
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Save R72 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Sara Eliza Johnson's stunning, deeply visceral first collection,
"Bone Map" (2013 National Poetry Series Winner), pulls shards of
tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse, where violence
and terror infuse the body, the landscape, and dreams: a handful of
blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to
pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow exposed. "All moments
will shine if you cut them open. / Will glisten like entrails in
the sun." With figurative language that makes long, associative
leaps, and with metaphors and images that continually resurrect
themselves across poems, the collection builds and transforms its
world through a locomotive echo--a regenerative force--that comes
to parallel the psychic quest for redemption that unfolds in its
second half. The result is a deeply affecting composition that will
establish the already decorated young author as an important and
vital new voice in American poetry.
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