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American Spikenard
by
Sarah Vap (Goodreads Author)
2006 Iowa Poetry Prize winner
“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 girl...more
“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 girl...more
Paperback, 96 pages
Published
April 1st 2007
by University Of Iowa Press
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So anyway, I’ve been enjoying Sarah Vap’s Dummy Fire for the past week, and then I started reading her other 2007 book, American Spikenard, and was taken immediately by the power of her poems’ fragility.
I was thinking, reading Dummy Fire, that her poems threatened to disappear into the world, in enigmatic and powerful ways, gestural ways. I’ll stand by that for Dummy Fire, but American Spikenard is something of a different creature, at once moving toward the ephemerality of Dummy Fire, but with...more
I was thinking, reading Dummy Fire, that her poems threatened to disappear into the world, in enigmatic and powerful ways, gestural ways. I’ll stand by that for Dummy Fire, but American Spikenard is something of a different creature, at once moving toward the ephemerality of Dummy Fire, but with...more
I really enjoyed Vap's poetry. Her work is complex, and has a lot of enjoyable connections and witty lines.
Her poetry isn't easy. It takes multiple readings of each poem to come to an understanding, and I wouldn't say that it is a clear understanding. I like that she makes you work for each poem.
Vap has a lot of poems about horses, her subjects are whimsical and her language is playful. She has good titles that add to the poetry's meaning--very often you only understand them after you read the...more
Her poetry isn't easy. It takes multiple readings of each poem to come to an understanding, and I wouldn't say that it is a clear understanding. I like that she makes you work for each poem.
Vap has a lot of poems about horses, her subjects are whimsical and her language is playful. She has good titles that add to the poetry's meaning--very often you only understand them after you read the...more
Sarah Vap’s "American Spikenard" is largely concerned with childhood and family. There are poems about being a girl, about grandmothers, sisters, parents. (There are also horses.) The book is dedicated to the poet’s “beautiful family” and the opening quote is a gorgeous one from Andre Breton: “The reins were made of words of love, I believe.”
What I liked most about the poems were the language and structure. They’re built like thin plates of ice that take on strange patterns, and sometimes swing...more
What I liked most about the poems were the language and structure. They’re built like thin plates of ice that take on strange patterns, and sometimes swing...more
Vap sort of pre-empts a particular kind of review of her book by stating in one of the poems late in this book that she is tired of being called difficult. So I won't do that.
The poems here are dense and impacted, as if each one is a new kind of form, and each one requires special tools and approaches, visionary insights to really penetrate. It makes this book, full of poems that on the page are very spare (I think only one goes beyond a page, and Vap's line usually isn't that long) an incredib...more
The poems here are dense and impacted, as if each one is a new kind of form, and each one requires special tools and approaches, visionary insights to really penetrate. It makes this book, full of poems that on the page are very spare (I think only one goes beyond a page, and Vap's line usually isn't that long) an incredib...more
Sarah's such a great poet I want to harm myself!
Jan 13, 2010
Clara Kwun
added it
I just happened upon this book in a bookstore- it is a collection of poems focused mainly on American girlhood. Anyone with an interest in this subject will enjoy these poems.
Another poet I have only come to know recently. Very fine.
Jul 03, 2012
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Sarah Vap is the author of American Spikenard, winner of the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize, and Dummy Fire, winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Poetry Prize.
She is Poetry Editor at the online journal 42 Opus, and lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.
More about Sarah Vap...
She is Poetry Editor at the online journal 42 Opus, and lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.
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Jul 01, 2010 11:15am