Sometimes it’s seaweed in your throat you can’t cough out
or an ink cloud expanding in your skull. Sometimes it’s primal
like the force of an oyster making a pearl to protect itself
after a harvester surgically implants its poison, or the heart
growing a tumor that can’t be extracted without killing you,
or pressure crushing your lungs to fists deep underwater.
Sometimes, you sink so far down from the sun your tongue
bloats like an anglerfish floating in a well, lost, unable to breathe
or speak, but each day you feel it trying to say something
about the shining dead language it once knew, watch its cells
burst into blue specks of light when you open your mouth.
A tiny syllable. Then darkness again. But each time a little bluer,
a little more like the home you’ve forgotten, my stranger
looking back at me from the mirror, just wanting me to reach
through and hold you.
I first discovered Sara Eliza Johnson’s Vapor during a spontaneous stop at the New York City Public Library in April 2023. The library had prepared lovely little book bundles wrapped in gold ribbons for anyone daring enough to be emotionally eviscerated by four random poetry collections at once. Vapor, with its bright, hot pink cloud covered cover called out to me. Time seemed to suddenly skip forward and, in an almost delirious state, I found myself floating through the gorgeously volatile language and images within its pages.
While there aren’t enough adjectives in existence to properly describe the range of emotion represented in Johnson’s second collection, this review by Marianne Baruch provides a fairly sound summary:
“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.”
As exaggerated as it may sound, every poem here served as both a personal and cosmic journey for me. Considering the fact that my top obsessions are confessional poetry, astronomy, and biology, it should be no surprise that I instantly fell in love with Johnson’s work and was more than willing to be scared—again and again. “The Abyssal Zone” in particular spoke to both the poet and the sci-fi nerd nestled within my big black heart. I hope you enjoyed my reading and will consider picking up Sara Eliza Johnson’s book Vapor.
- A.X.