> Saturnalia Books: Dummy Fire by Sarah Vap

$14
978-0-9754990-5-4

Dummy Fire
poetry by Sarah Vap


Winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize
Selected by Forrest Gander

$14


 

“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.”

— Forrest Gander, judge

“From the verses of gnostic antiquity to Whitman’s drawn chorus of lading, from winter wilderness to the dazzling volunteering imagery of her solitary voice, Sarah Vap startles again and again with a quiet, hermetic originality that American poetry has never successfully supported before—she is brilliant and something entirely new under our sun.”
–Norman Dubie

“A poetic image can touch the depths before it disturbs the surface, as Bachelard says. If we understand this principle, we’re ready to receive Sarah Vap’s radical imaginative leaps in her debut poetry collection, Dummy Fire (winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Book Prize). In Vap’s poems, we encounter such surprises as a dress with the secret memory of a cow, and “pelvis-shaped clouds” that move over a snake-handler as he burns a tick off a snake. She writes often of mothers and sisters, landscapes and mystics, with a cowgirl-nervy wit balanced by tenderness. Throughout Dummy Fire, Vap raises questions about what is authentic and true versus what is fake or “dummy”—like trees witnessing a deliberate fire, or a mysterious nomad that may, or may not be, Santa. "
–Anna Journey, Blackbird

 

Everything Offered Happens

I suspect there are two things
going on here: a cry-accident, and the patience that built you.

I don’t believe in geological time—so no one can tell me
when to begin. Vapor remains here, behind the circulating

heavy station, increasingly simpler. I love that whole idea.
The idea we hold over ourselves, especially sitting

near the bed. Especially in one ear. I love the idea
that it feels good to be here, without apology

for how good you are. I wish
I had been nicer; I laugh for things. Love

their approximations. This is as close as I can get:

everything must be loved—omens wait
in the deep-freeze, rocking at night. I'm a little embarrassed

by what I love. Intimate with thousands. More and more
I wish it wasn’t so hard for you.

That it hadn't been made so hard. I wish angels would come
with wings of cedar. I've invited one,

especially, to sleep near me. To signal, and to include
the exact time.
 

 

Sarah Vap was raised in Missoula, Montana, and currently lives in Phoenix where she teaches for the Young Writers Program at Arizona State University. She is the author of American Spikenard (University of Iowa Press, 2007).

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Last Update: December 12, 2009