Sara Eliza Johnson

Biography

Sara Eliza Johnson’s first book, Bone Map (Milkweed, 2014), was selected for the 2013 National Poetry Series. Her second book of poetry, Vapor, is forthcoming (Milkweed, 2022). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the VCCA, among other honors, and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

See Work

POETRY / Winter 2021

When the Moon is Full, the Trees Speak in Unison

By Sara Eliza Johnson

Here’s a lesson: If you leave a hole in the forest, / leave a mouth open in pain, astonishment or grief, / something will come to fill it

POETRY / Winter 2021

The Abyssal Zone

By Sara Eliza Johnson

Sometimes it’s seaweed in your throat you can’t cough out / or an ink cloud expanding in your skull

POETRY / Winter 2021

Terra Incognita

By Sara Eliza Johnson

Out here, I’m lonely enough to open / my body for anyone that finds me

POETRY / Winter 2021

Little Rabbit

By Sara Eliza Johnson

Some mornings, I come to on the floor, / my neck burned with moon tracks

POETRY / Summer 2017

Nebula

By Sara Eliza Johnson


The anemone of your dream blooms
inside the vacuum of space.
In your pocket of black wind

POETRY / Summer 2017

Pyroclast

By Sara Eliza Johnson

When my body blew open
the shadow-glass cloud
galloped through me, glittered

POETRY / Summer 2017

Gravitational Wave

By Sara Eliza Johnson

At night in the field, I felt the curvature of a palpable
time around me, felt the dark
foam of the waveform rise and collapse