Faulkner's Rosary

by Sarah Vap

Overview

Sarah Vap, award-winning author of Dummy Fire and American Spikenard, dazzles again with this third collection. Vap celebrates the mysteries of pregnancy with wonder, fear, sorrow, and joy. Like counting the beads on a rosary, she takes us along a trail of connected couplets, building a concrete yet mythic exploration of the body as it prepares to bring another body into the world. Alice Notley writes, “This is a poetry of light, edge, and coherence, and it is beautiful.” And Cynthia Hogue adds, “I am in awe of the rare beauty of these poems.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780981859163
Publisher:	Saturnalia Books
Publication date:	10/01/2010
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

SARAH VAP is the author Dummy Fire, winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by Forrest Gander. Her second collection, American Spikenard (2006), was the winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2006. She currently lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington with her husband and two sons.

Table of Contents

Lifted, adoring—then—
Linea Nigra: cross of jubilee Someone to be good in front of Memorare Conception Arizona Eggtooth Children We grew in a redwood house Fallopian A cradle of warmed oats for the chickens on the Epiphany Meditation on pink Meditation on blue Living together Glory be Howling cabooses alongside A bear as big as an angus in my parents' backyard A kingdom of garish cat's-eyes Lullaby for a disappearing child Spill Moonlight and firelight, beholden to the desert Summer: the pink fungus on rocks Sonogram Sonogram The humanity ghost Glory be Horizontal lightning Sonogram In the dream you were the horse Sonogram Baby I want to give you something invisible you motherfucker The last question of snow & childhood Self-portrait as a butter-churner Snuggery Fink, Punk, Nincompoop, Honky-tonk, Sunlight, Sunnysideup...
To be breathed-in by a god Glory be Horses By silence Pandemonium Quickening Reconcile Primagravida Unloose Making love in the middle of May Inlaid Call Glory be Phoenix spring sunshine Summer in Phoenix: an answer to the vanishing god Sunlight is orange through blood June Fandango, triple-time Saint-star, itching-pea Apartment building named Fontanel The heartstone beads Green moon Return, return, return (Jimenez); Contact! Contact! (Thoreau)
Hail holy Notes

Editorial Reviews

Pregnancy, motherhood, children, sex, and majestic rural or wild landscapes find raw illumination in Vap's often exciting third collection. Moments of joy in nature or in sex rip through her sometimes ragged free verse lines, while bodily danger and metaphysical dread stay close behind. "Self-Portrait as a Butter-Churner" turns farm life into a lush erotic trope: "mouthfuls at the crank of the barrel churn, of sweet cream/ before the butter arrives"" Another page, though, shows a literal wolf at the door, a "bull-trout" caught by hand, and "children's drowning-stories each spring—snow/ from the mountains into the drainage creek. A quarrel/ with life—certain lives do that." For all its interest in the fears and the ecstasies of adults, though, Vap's work shines most beside babies, or babies-to-be: a fetus is a "saint-star, itching-pea" whose "ears drop between my hip-points./ My belly is a blood-vessel filigree." The poet pays homage to her own mother as she portrays herself in a similar role—and yet she does so in a thoroughly up-to-date, sometimes fragmentary, even bizarre way. Even the book's religious overtones are never merely traditional: at her best (especially late in this short book) Vap shows family life made new. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly