Sarah Vap

In Winter: Effulgences and Devotions, Sarah Vap documents the obstacles to writing a single poem over a twelve-year period. Her account becomes a confrontation with the insidious, radiating, pliant character of late capitalism. She encounters it as a rootless system, an airborne contagion, a toxin in the walls of our homes. Pursuing her distractions across the years, Vap makes certain commitments: to remember the wars that her country is waging, which are meant to be invisible to her; to mourn the deaths of whales by sonar; to hear though she is deaf; to be present for the loss of winter, as she knows it, from earth; and to herself, a profane and multifarious creature who possibly has a soul. Reeling from the nonstop "competition" that sustains the anthropocene's profiteers, Vap offers an unapologetic case study of encroachment, susceptibility, tenderness, porousness and endurance.

Selected as a Winner of the National Poetry Series by Mary Jo Bang Sarah Vap's sixth work of poetry, Viability is an ambitious and highly imaginative collection of prose poems that braids together several kinds of language strands in an effort to understand and to ask questions about the bodies (and minds, maybe even souls) that are owned by capitalism. These threads of language include definitions from an online financial dictionary, samples from an essay on the economics of slavery, quotations from an article about slavery in today's Thai fishing industry, lyric bits and pieces about pregnancy and infants of all kinds, and a wealth of quotations falsely attributed to John of the Cross. The viability that Vap is asking about is primarily economic and biological (but not only). The questions of viability become entwined with the need, across the book, to "increase"--in both a capitalist and a gestational sense. John of the Cross tries, at first with composure, to comment on or to mediate between all the different strands of the collection.

If everyone decided to call themselves a girl/that word would stop. In this award-winning volume of authoritative and assertive poems, Sarah Vap embarks on an emotional journey to the land of America's female children. Questioning, contradicting, radically and restlessly demanding acceptance, she searches for a way to move from serious girlhood to womanly love. Demonstrating the seriousness of female childhood - which is as dangerous and profound as war, economics, and history, that is, as manhood, in her view - Vap reveals the extremes of self-doubt and self-righteousness inherent in being a contemporary American girl. ""When we're overcome/by everything we think we love - then by morning/we're adults."" Just as the oil of American spikenard may provide relief from childhood, so does Sarah Vap provide the kind of holy and extravagant love and honor that can relieve the growing pains of ""everyone's little girl."" Pan of crayons and candles, trusting in them the solidarity. Or in her - she's free not to care any longer. To put out pumpkins for the bear. But which lover was it kissed her in his sleep? Put her in a river to cool down. There's a reduceless feeling: that womankind dropped her memory. That six folded-around interstates make a city's red chakra and I'm sorry it wasn't me dropped since she touched the chair of anger that shares a wall with the ground of bearings. Dyslexia makes her holy ghost polyglot. In the history of disclosures we think we're all stretched out next to her, but there she goes calling kitty kitty at the on-ramp.