[Review] Bone Map, by Sara Eliza Johnson

Review by Nicole Capó

There is magic to be found in the mundane.

“All moments will shine/if you cut them open,/glisten like entrails in the sun,” says Sara Eliza Johnson in her poem “As the Sickle Moon Guts a Cloud.” And cut she does, stripping away at the layers of those moments to find what lives underneath in her first collection of poetry, Bone Map. Though her work consistently touches on themes of death and disease, war and pain, it’s also full of color and light — It’s easy to imagine Johnson sitting in a sun-drenched room ruminating on the brilliance of blood.

Despite the ripeness of her poetry, Johnson’s vivid imagery stands in stark contrast to her careful use of language. Her phrases are slow and thoughtful, evoking images that are as striking as they are subtle. In “Frühlingstraum,” for instance, the narrator is reflecting on her hands while gardening, when suddenly:

I scrape my palm on a rock
and it bleeds into the soil
(which will bring tomatoes, strawberries). It is good
to be alive.

Johnson’s stories become living creatures that she examines precisely – like a surgeon making perfect cuts into flesh, each thought curated before being laid out on the page. What she discovers in doing so is that everything is connected, and the balance found in nature exists because of this. The repetition of contrasts — between life and death, pain and love, light and dark — is what defines her poetry and makes its inhabitants come alive. In “Deer Rub,” a deer follows a ritual, shedding the velvet from its antlers before eating the velvet, which leaves the deer’s mouth “stained with berries/of its own blood.” At the same time, Johnson muses, somewhere around the world, “a bomb strips away someone’s skin” and all of these actions echo on into the future, “when two people wake in a house/and do not touch each other.”

Johnson understands the importance of these stories, of allowing them to live on by telling and retelling them, and by exploring them from new angles. Her poem “Märchen” — a word which loosely translates as “fairy tale” in German — follows a couple lost in the dark woods as they come across the body of a dead and maggot-ridden wolf. In whispers they recall the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which takes on a new light as Johnson chooses to focus the attention on the little girl’s escape:

Keep talking. How did the story go?
How dark it was inside the wolf,

which had begun as a clump
of darkness inside another wolf.
Then the child climbed out its belly

shining, without a name—
with only a red cap by which to call her
and the animal guts in her hands.

Johnson also realizes the importance of shape in giving depth to her words, and “Lesson” literally traces the path of a scared and wounded stag as it runs across the forest:

            The stag broke
through bramble
                        and stream, broke an owl-
call to pieces, broke further
                        through the sun’s remains,
                        trampling the organs
into black blood as it ran.

Johnson’s poems are sensory snapshots of time, weaving together images that remind the reader to look past the obvious in order to discover the truth of things. “I am hungry but whole,” she states; be curious, and in that curiosity you will find satisfaction. And something even deeper than satisfaction is promised as well —

This must be
what love is:

a pain so radiant
it cuts through all others.

There is magic in this, too.

***

Nicole Capó is Puerto Rican by birth and a resident of Washington, DC by choice. She’s covered tech, science, and pop culture news, reviewed plays and books and attended local events for The Daily Lounge, K Street Magazine, Sabotage Reviews, The Literary Review, and Bookslut. Find her on Instagram: @nicole.capo, or on Twitter: @nicapo11.