Dummy Fire

by Sarah Vap

Winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize selected by Forrest Gander, this is poet Sarah Vap's first full-length poetry collection. Dummy Fire is a book full of surprises, its arms wide enough to encircle, it seems, all of creation, from the deeply personal to the existential. In Sarah Vap’s debut book a mother’s nose bleeds into tomato soup and a great blue heron is vivisected on a dinner table. There is nothing she is afraid to say. “Sarah Vap,” writes Forrest Gander, “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.” And Norman Dubie adds, “she is brilliant and something entirely new under our sun.”

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Allyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to wear a dress made from the poems of this book.

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dummy Fire by Sarah Vap starts with the poem, "Everything Offered Happens," with the glorious word "cry-accident." And these lines, "I don't believe in geographical time—so no one can tell me/when to begin." Later: I wish/I had been nicer." And more: "everything must be loved—omens wait/in the deep freeze, rocking at night. I'm a little embrassed//by what I love. Intimate with thousands. More and more/I wish it wasn't so hard for you/I wish angels would love/with wings of cedar"

Here's a full poem:

"do it the way god does it"

the woman he is with, her legs
move evermore slowly.

she has borne
in secret the want

that opens true things
at little angles

it wasn't important—

A deep book worth a slow and careful read. She's a brilliant writer.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am trying to understand what is so different about this book and American Spikenard. Especially because I like American Spikenard, and this one just seems to be pushing me away. I can't find its center. I hear the poems rolling into themselves, the sentences, when there are sentences, have that sense of inevitability to them. But I find myself debating whether these poems are pleasurably ambiguous or arbitrary.

[Katrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Every time you think you're done, you're not..."
Beautiful vision.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complicated, demanding, rewarding.