Works by
Sarah Vap
(Poet)

American Spikenard (2007) -- Winner 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize
“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.”

Dummy Fire (2007)
Dummy Fire is a riveting book, remarkable for its ferocious economy of form, its landscape-haunted, but wide-ranging field of reference, and its explosive implication. The poems often have the pressurized inventiveness of a curse or a protective spell and like a curse or spell, they lay bare the vulnerabilities of the body. Sarah Vap combines an utterly unsentimental domestic tenderness with an attentiveness to the lives of plants and animals that never approaches nature poetry because it never seems separated from that realm. With its laconic, purposively innovative adjustments of language, Dummy Fire stands out.