Sara Eliza Johnson’s “Bone Map” is as clear as it is piercing. Image courtesy of amazon.com

Poetry review: 5 out of 5 stars

Sara Eliza Johnson won the National Poetry Series in 2014 with her interesting and dark poetry book “Bone Map.”

The cover alone should let readers know of the mild gore in “Bone Map” — it’s pitch black for the most part with the title “Bone Map” in the color of fresh blood. The focal point of the cover is a horse. Cute, right? Except it is a detailed medical drawing of a horse, complete with bones, muscles and even tiny blood vessels.

The medical drawings of horses continue on pages 28 and 29 as well as on page 34. On pages 28 and 29, we see a horse’s head and shoulder with the same bone and muscle detail as the cover, only this time the reader is drawn to the horse’s eye and how it looks not covered by its own skin. On page 34, we see the horse’s front legs and all of the bones and muscles connected to its hooves.

Johnson’s poems themselves are fairytale-like, and not exactly like the nice, Victorian era fairytales — but the older Brother’s Grimm fairy tales. With poem titles such as “When There is Burning Instead” and “As the Sickle Guts the Cloud,” the reader never totally gets away from the mild gore described throughout.

Readers understand lines like “glistening like entrails in the sun, my hook/ in the mouth of the world” and “I saw/ a femur in half” sprinkled in most of the poems in this collection, along with magical images like the allusion to the Little Red Riding Hood at the end of the poem “Märchen.”

The only real break readers get from some of this mild gore is later in the collection with Johnson’s “Archipelago” poems and her “Letters from the…” poems. There are still lines like “an eye/ plucked from its socket” that the reader may encounter.

I loved reading this beautiful work of poetry, and I feel it’s a great read for anyone. I am not a big fan of gore — the “Paranormal Activity” movies are about as scary as I will venture if we’re talking about horror movies. And with this book, there was just a little too much blood imagery. In her poem “View From the Fence, on Which I Sit and Dangle My Legs,” the second line is, “The horses are the night’s blood,” which I felt didn’t quite fit in with the poem. It was like Johnson was trying her best to add more gory images to her poems, especially with the line shown above.

And I was especially bothered by the imagery involving the eyes that were throughout her entire book -— eye plucking, eye floaters and eye slivers just to name a couple of eye-related images in some of her poems. The eye imagery was a little much for me. However, like I’ve stated before, my gore threshold is pretty low, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I am the only one who has these issues with the book.

Besides that, however, I still feel like this is an excellent collection of poetry. And, if you want to read an excellent book of poetry with rich imagery that will keep your attention with each page, then “Bone Map” will be an excellent read for you.

Kaitlyn Dahle is a staff writer for The Dakota Student. She can be reached at [email protected]