Bone Map: Poems
By Sara Eliza Johnson and Martha Collins
4/5
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About this ebook
“These poems, like light, clarify even as they pierce.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Selected for the National Poetry Series by Martha Collins, Sara Eliza Johnson’s stunning, deeply visceral first collection pulls shards of tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse.
Here 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, Bone Map 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 establishes Sara Eliza Johnson as a vital new voice in American poetry.
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Book preview
Bone Map - Sara Eliza Johnson
Fable
In the forest, the owl releases a boneless cry.
I know the names of things here
and I can hold them.
I hold your hand:
a matryoshka opening deeper
until I can hear your bones
singing into mine,
and feel the moon
as it rolls through you
like a great city before a war
where it has been night for so long
that everyone sees
with their hands,
and then somewhere in the city
a newborn animal
shakes the dust off itself
and stands, makes
a thimbleful of sound,
and a boy standing in the square
turns toward it,
and his father, not knowing
what his hands will be made to do
to other men,
places a hand on his head.
Deer Rub
Deep in the forest, where no one has gone,
where rain bloats the black moss and mud,
a deer is rubbing its forelock and antlers
against a tree. The velvet that covers the antlers
unwinds into strips, like bandages.
The rain scratches at the deer’s coat
as if trying to get inside, washes the antlers
of blood, like a curator cleaning the bones
of a saint in the crypt beneath a