Exhuming Buried Power: A Review of Vapor by Sara Eliza Johnson
by Amie Whittemore
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As a teenager obsessed with Tori Amos, I listened to each new release in what now seems like an old-fashioned way: as an album, considering how each song led into the one that followed, considering the emotional and narrative arcs from start to finish. However, like an obsessed teenager, I also wanted to stitch each album together, along with each song, to see a thread between Boys for Pele which ends with 鈥淭winkle,鈥� and From the Choirgirl Hotel, which begins with 鈥淪park.鈥� In other words, I already thought like a poet arranging a manuscript.
So, it was with much anticipation that I encountered Sara Eliza Johnson鈥檚 second collection, Vapor, as I adored her debut, Bone Map, and was deeply curious about where her work would take her. Much of what I loved about Bone Map is present in Vapor; in both there鈥檚 a strong sense of world-building鈥攐r in the case of Vapor worlds-building鈥攖hough these worlds are built, in both collections, with spare materials. Both are informed by trauma, grief and loss, but I feel a strange, at once tenacious and hesitant resilience in Vapor, whose speaker is migratory, is transitioning/evolving鈥攊nto what or whom, we can鈥檛 be sure.
Like Bone Map, Vapor has a muted palette; it is drenched in shadow though also sparked with honey, with radioactivity. In Vapor, we follow a speaker whose curiosity about her own wounds and perception of self as unlovable is balanced by鈥攑erhaps challenged by鈥攁 curiosity about the worlds beyond鈥攁bout what it might mean to visit Titan or Proxima Centauri or the radioactive landscapes of a future earth. The speaker seems so deeply uncomfortable with having a/experiencing a/being a self that the only way to make amends with this alienation within oneself is to look without鈥攖o become an alien, a mutant, a revelation.
While Johnson deftly balances narrative and lyric impulses, I found myself most drawn to the poems with more of a narrative arc, such as 鈥淧yroclast,鈥� which comes early in the book. In it, the speaker gives birth to her own pain, 鈥渁 newborn foal / I nursed on my own milk / and licked dry after rain.鈥� Though she feeds it what she can, it wants to 鈥渃limb back / inside鈥� and 鈥渆xhausted, I let it come / home. A heart can beat // outside a body. So can a wound.鈥� Here Johnson鈥檚 ability to write with restraint and tenderness about pain, grounding it through such haunting imagery, is showcased. What I most admire here, as in other poems, is the ways in which the interior landscape and exterior landscape are, if not quite twinned, somehow made siblings. The poems seem as much to mourn and wrestle with interpersonal trauma as they do ecological trauma, and yet avoid making false equivalencies. Indeed, there鈥檚 a way in which the poems argue that personal healing or transformation might be the gateway to ecological healing. Or, the poems seem to say with a shrug, if not, departure from the self, from the earth, might be best.
Thus, there鈥檚 a speculative quality to Vapor, as the poems interrogate off-planet landscapes. I especially appreciated, the 鈥淭itan鈥� sequence, three poems that explore the lakes of Titan, one of Saturn鈥檚 moons. In 鈥淭itan (Kraken Mare),鈥� one of the questions Vapor raises is centered: what is consciousness and how might it migrate or evolve to inhabit the universe? The poem uses the second person to explore what this might be like:
听 听 听 听 听 Now you open. Your new eyes in this lake鈥�
听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 or not your eyes but a memory
听 听 听 听 听 of sight鈥攁s like blood vessels the waves open in you鈥�
听 听 听 听 听 [鈥
听 听 听 听 听 鈥攜ou the brightest mote in the eye of the lake
听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 that opens for you, lets you
听 听 听 听 听 grow your mind deeper within it, and which through you learns the miracle
听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 听 of mitosis: a kind of breathing through dream.
Here, again, we see the blending of the interior and exterior landscapes鈥攖he waves become blood vessels the 鈥測ou鈥� pours itself into鈥攁s well as a sense of hope in this alien world: the word 鈥渙pen鈥� repeats five times across the body of the poem, as it moves from harsh openings, such as 鈥渁 wind had once disemboweled you, hollowed out your face鈥� to the image of 鈥済row[ing] your mind deeper within it,鈥� suggesting a homecoming, a renewal, even mutation. Even the use of the second person, which is frequent in Vapor suggests otherness鈥攖his is happening to someone else, or some part of the speaker that feels apart from herself.
This distancing ebbs and flows within the collection and I find myself most drawn to those moments when the speaker鈥檚 vulnerability, so often obscured by sharp imagery and observation, shines, as in 鈥淢utant,鈥� (originally published in Southern Indiana Review) which comes near the collection鈥檚 end. The poem begins, 鈥淎ll the wildflowers turn away from me / as I pull my shame up from my throat.鈥� The shame is an organ and a wild creature, 鈥渁 black jellyfish, a tentacled heart still / connected to me by a single blue vein.鈥� And then鈥攐ne of the many startling revelations the collection offers: 鈥淚 know everything needs love, even this creature / which opens, despite its pain.鈥� This compassion for the self, for the self鈥檚 experience of shame allows the speaker to, at last, also access her power; the poem ends:
听 听 听 听 听 I am an irradiated thing that needs someone
听 听 听 听 听 to hold it closed, and no one can hold a thing
听 听 听 听 听 like that long enough to love it
听 听 听 听 听 unless maybe they, too, have been ruined,
听 听 听 听 听 cast out or kept hidden,
听 听 听 听 听 named abomination
听 听 听 听 听 after someone tried to bury their power
听 听 听 听 听 and failed.
Here the slippery diction of 鈥渉old it closed鈥� rather than 鈥渉old close鈥� is telling: the speaker is not asking to be held as a lover might, but rather as an overstuffed suitcase that requires pressure to be zipped. That is, perhaps, that pain recognizes pain; trauma recognizes trauma; and while each pain, each trauma, is individual, if we are all part of a ruined ecology, if we are all part of a singular yet complex consciousness, might recognition serve as a bridge? Might we be able to tell a wound it鈥檚 okay to heal, to close? Might our buried power irradiate us and change us into something, dangerous yes, but renewed?
Such wonderful questions鈥攁nd that, to me, is what makes Vapor an excellent book. I am left with so many questions. I am not sure of the answers, but I know they require curiosity, bravery, a willingness to migrate, to transform into something that may contain the human but seeps beyond it.
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received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon and her PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah. Her first book, Bone Map, won the 2013 National Poetry Series, and her second, Vapor, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2022. 鈥� |
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听is the author of the poetry collection听Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-Tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books, 2023), and Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and was named a 2020 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow. |