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    Bone Map: Poems
    Bone Map: Poems
    Bone Map: Poems
    Ebook69 pages32 minutes

    Bone Map: Poems

    By Sara Eliza Johnson and Martha Collins

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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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781571319197
    Bone Map: Poems

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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

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