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What We’re Reading: Bone Map

2014 November 13
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What We're Reading

I grew up in the days of the “Land Before Time” and “My Little Pony.” Every kid in my class had either a rubber dinosaur or plastic pony; we imagined pre-historic landscapes and rolling pastures for our anthropomorphized friends to romp and rally. Somehow, even in adulthood, that equine magic lives on. But I’ve never imagined horses the way they are portrayed in this book of poems. Here they are prehistoric in their perfection, decidedly animal, and the landscapes around them are real with poetic prowess.

bone-map-230Bone Map by Sara Eliza Johnson (Milkweed Editions, 2014)

Bone Map is Sara Eliza Johnson’s debut collection. The book was selected by Martha Collins as a winner of the National Poetry Series 2013 Open Competition. Johnson discusses her thrill and trepidation associated with such an award in this interview with Connotation Press. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Utah.

As with all good books of poems, Bone Map creates a lexicon of image and language; more importantly, however, is that Johnson explores that lexicon to such unrelenting depths, that words like “wolf,” “milk,” and “glisten” may never be the same for her readers. “Märchen” left me shivering long after I’d closed the book. The title is German for “fairy tale” and this poem is a drastic mis-telling of Little Red Riding Hood. It begins:

Lost in the forest one night, we find the body

of a wolf, its throat torn open,

the wound a cupful of rippling

 

black milk, where maggots curl star-white

in their glistening darkness. […]

What Johnson reveals through this poem, and others, is an Old World lore—a place of wish-making and ritual—where we are taken to confront love and grief with magic spells and blood at our disposal for making meaning.

Similarly graphic, “The Last Przwalski’s Horse” is gruesome only in its own acuity. Tenderness underlies anatomical destruction, as the body is dismantled, consumed:

[…]

He unsheathes his knife

and slices the breast-

bone, up the abdomen,

then splits the pelvis, rolls

organs from the opening:

little planets gone soft

with blood. Cuts away

the glistening red web

of matter around the heart

[…]

If there is a mis-step in the work at hand, it may be the occasional eagerness for closure. In “Beekeeping,” the reader lives “At the edge of the valley // wild hyacinths, violet ones,” for most of the poem. Repeated bee stings become a metaphor for love, but the metaphor is made in such a direct way, that it seems to deflate the magical world of all previous stanzas: “This must be / what love is: // a pain so radiant / it cuts through all others.”

My only other question, (and this really is a question for you, dear readers) concerns the use of war as a secondary metaphor for a lovers’ quarrel. In “Deer Rub,” a beautifully executed poem with blood as “berries,” a wartime scene intersects with the primary action of a deer rubbing his antlers after winter.

[…]

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 church

and the end of a century, when the people

 

have begun to think of the bodies

as truly dead and unraisable,

 

when children have begun to carry knives

in their pockets. […]

The war diction returns later, just before the poet clinches the poem with a couplet ostensibly iterating the heart of the poem’s matter: “long after this morning / when the country / wakes to another war, // when two people wake in a house / and do not touch each other.” I guess what I’m wondering, is whether drawing such a comparison is completely ethical, given the disproportion between a country at war and a relationship gone cold.

Johnson demonstrates ardent formal consideration in poems like “View From the Fence, On Which I Sit and Dangle My Legs.” Here, horses are fully imagined in the scope of their interiority and physical placement, and the internal rhyme offers formal connection between environment and body. Sonically, the poem pours down the page ending, appropriately, with the line, “to laughter: I will follow you down.”

The collection also includes two intertwined series, one of archipelagos which reimagines the sea-voyage of 11th century Irish disciple St. Brendan, and the other, a series of instructions and letters from an ice field. These poems deal with grief and loss more explicitly than earlier poems in the book and ambitiously weave something epic with a decidedly lyric voice.

Johnson’s work is fanciful, bloody, and deliberate. Bone Map may lose you in a forest, ice field, or the sea, but I can promise  that you’ll be accompanied in those chilly places by a body, if not alive, then still hot and buzzing.

 

Fall Book Preview

2014 September 12
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What We're ReadingFall came up in a hurry here in Minnesota. The last few days have brought temps in the 50s and gusts of wind that signal summer is over. Fall is one of those seasons where I want to wrap myself up in a blanket with a hot cup of tea (or maybe a pumpkin porter) and sit down with a good book. Today, in embracing the spirit of fall, we’ve pulled together a short list of upcoming fall book releases that have our tongues a-wagging, itching to carve aside some time to read.

baboonBaboon by Naja Marie Aidt (Two Lines Press, short fiction)
This is a book I am especially excited about, and you will see a full review soon from me. Aidt pulls back the layers to reveal a raw look at daily life of her different characters, and the darkness that lies there, brooding. These are stories of average people, but with an underbelly of desperation at the cusp of crisis: husbands cheating on wives, bizarre experiences, experimental sexuality and more. These moments of crisis are magnified to uncomfortable closeness, as we face truths all to familiar.

Best to Laugh by Lorna Landvik (University of Minnesota Press, fiction)
Minnesota author Landvik strikes again with a book about a young stand-up comedian who leaves the Midwest to make her big break in Hollywood. Landvik pulls from her own experiences (she has done stand-up shows herself), and woos the reader with her well-spun combination of humor and heart. This is sure to be a fun romp of a novel for those looking for something lighter after reading Baboon.

a girl is a half formed thingA Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (Coffee House Press, fiction)
A young woman and her relationship with her brother are at the heart of this debut novel; family, violence, sex, and trauma are all subjects brought into play with the characters. McBride has the literary world a-buzz, having been called a “genius” with “uncompromising”, “shocking” and “incredibly original” style. Girl has already won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction Kerry Group Irish Novel of the year award and the Goldsmiths Prize. This is a must-read.

Bone Map by Sara Eliza Johnson (Milkweed Editions, poetry)
Bone Map is the first collection from Johnson, and is a tightly wound, visceral force of a collection that has already won the 2013 National Poetry Series. Nature, animals, and the body collide with violence, raw intensity, and insight. It will be an exercise in imagery and physicality for the reader.

 

What new or forthcoming books have you excited for fall reading — what’s missing from our list? Do you have a favorite fall reading routine?