Vapor: Poems

by Sara Eliza Johnson

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.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published August 9, 2022

About the author

Sara Eliza Johnson's first book, Bone Map (Milkweed Editions, 2014), was selected for the 2013 National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Blackbird, DIAGRAM, Copper Nickel, Boston Review, Ninth Letter, New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, Crab Orchard Review, Pleiades, Meridian, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Winter Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and an Academy of American Poets Prize from the University of Utah, where she was a Vice Presidential Fellow in Poetry. She teaches at the University of Alaska--Fairbanks.

Reviews

[Cynthia Arrieu-King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very subtle and jewel like system of images at work in these poems about the micro and macro currents in nature and in the mind. A lot of wind doing things I've never seen in poems. Beautiful, and it doesn't work to say the voice is dark or depressed, it's long been eviscerated from fleshly life. A masterful book for the Anthropocene.

[Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful combination of the natural world and our humanity. Going seamlessly from the cosmos to the depths of the ocean, the human heart to the grief and love of living.

[Carly Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sara Eliza Johnson is a master world-builder--how obsession carves such a shine, even in the dark, where the mind lights, so illuminated with Johnson's poems, you never want to leave.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...a cell divides into another/into exoskeleton into talons and teeth for the wild// flowers dividing not like a body sawed/ in half but how languages meet and depart// though this world will never know itself again/ will not remember the wounds it suffered here.." In "Vapor," Sara Eliza Johnson expands poetry into outer space even as she makes of it a microscope pointed into our own inner realms. Most intriguing and ambitious work.

[BibliophageTeaMage _Cheyenne Corty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully hypnotic poetry collection. Deep, insightful, and intellectual. Each poem felt like looking through a kaleidoscope. Pick this up if you want poems that touch your soul in a wholly natural and ethereal way.

Thoughtful, emotional, impactful.

A love letter to the primordial ooze.

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few poems in, I thought Sara Eliza Johnson had written one of my favorite books of the year. By the end of this collection, I thought she might have written one of my favorite books of all time.

Johnson is an expert at craft, image, and lyric—metaphors soar through each other or grow alongside one another. Lines move dynamically and easily (not to mention musically) between ideas and phrases. The poems in VAPOR are so precise as to feel perfected in a lab, but never lose their humanness, the sense of where they exist in the body. And these poems do exist in the body—the body that is broken down cell by cell and expanded out across galaxies. They telescope in and out beautifully, placing every image and idea against the backdrop of time and space, and our (brief) place in it.

If that all sounds too grandiose, too hyperbolic, and you think poems couldn’t possibly carry all of that work inside them—you haven’t read VAPOR, and I heartily recommend you do.

[Natalie Eilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sara Eliza Johnson's second collection bubbles with origins, not through miracle but through microbes and worms and plankton, geometrical objects and nebulae. The book teems with intangible armageddons, light's atheism. Johnson's a deft lyric writer, and reading Vapor is like being lit by a fever that brings us the cosmos and the infinitesimal at once. It made me anxious, dizzy, claustrophobic in my body. The work tugs at me. I feel its despair as we teeter in our dimensional death. I've read and reread these lines: "My body opens elsewhere / and elsewhere, until / I forget. And forget // what I am." That would be enough, but she pulls us more: "The hardest part / of being alive is / some hungers // are infinite." I love this book. It terrifies me.

[Elise Pino · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in this book span from haunting to horrifying in an incredibly talented way. Johnson’s ability to write with phrases that are simultaneously beautiful and disturbing is impressive. I also loved her play with scientific concepts throughout.

[Cooch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some good poems

There is genius here. These are ambitious poems that mostly don't fully succeed. They are well worth reading because of their great ideas and uses of language which don't always fully bear fruit.

[Gosha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always like the idea of poetry that uses the language of science but in practice I mostly find it corny. definitely a few gems in here, though, and to be fair I think I liked it more when I first picked it up and then it got repetitive

[Stephen Byrne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, quality brilliant work by Johnson. Few poets in the US write like this, actually interesting, and different.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. Read my review here: https://www.usi.edu/sir/meter-reader/...

[Lea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I liked the themes I think the style might not be my favourite.

[Bee · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars. This stunning collection was described to me as an "anti-pastoral," and it certainly lives up to this challenge in the best way possible. Void of greenery, of lush meadows, and with no mention of trees until the penultimate poem, Johnson gives us the primordial.

The boundaries between body and Earth are violently broken down into a new kind of love language. In each poem, Johnson delves into the infinite worlds of the infinite particles that make us up, casting away a sense of identity for kinship with air, water, and fire.

Many concepts (honey, spines, etc.) are reused throughout the poems, though as a means of connection or repetition, I couldn't always tell.

A welcome addition to poetry for those (like me) who tend to find comfort in natural poetry - Johnson takes the entire concept and turns it on its head in an enchanting way.

[Aether · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOLY MOLY WHAT IS THIS BOOK!!!!!!!! THE WAY EVERYTHING WAS DESCRIBED???? AND THE METAPHORS USED TO FURTHER DETAIL THINGS????? I AM OBSESSED WHAT THE HECK THIS WAS A SPECTACULAR READ

Second Read: stunnninnnnnggggg. This book uses words and imagery in ways i am so so dazzled by. this book speaks things aloud i thought were secrets stored in my bones. This book is everything to me.