Winter: Effulgences and Devotions

by Sarah Vap

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. In WINTER: EFFULGENCES AND DEVOTIONS, Sarah Vap documents the obstacles to writing a single poem over a twelve-year period. Her account becomes a confrontation with the insidious, radiating, pliant character of late capitalism. She encounters it as a rootless system, an airborne contagion, a toxin in the walls of our homes. Pursuing her distractions across the years, Vap makes certain commitments: to remember the wars that her country is waging, which are meant to be invisible to her; to mourn the deaths of whales by sonar; to hear though she is deaf; to be present for the loss of winter, as she knows it, from earth; and to herself, a profane and multifarious creature who possibly has a soul. Reeling from the nonstop "competition" that sustains the anthropocene's profiteers, Vap offers an unapologetic case study of encroachment, susceptibility, tenderness, porousness and endurance.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2019

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

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am spreading my butt cheeks as far apart as I can to reveal something, I

Sarah Vap has no filter.

And that's a good thing. We need poets with no filters, poets who are willing to ask difficult questions. Poets willing to examine their own contradictions, who will remind you at the bottom of EVERY page that: "drones are probably killing someone right now". Poets willing to face how far they'll love:

When the babies arrived I began to devise the killing of my enemies

At times she reminds me of Helene Cixous when she said "ascent downward because we ordinarily believe the descent is easy. The writers I love are descenders, explorers of the lowest and deepest."

Likewise, Vap writes:

What would it mean to a reader who doesn't love me to know that I have never hoped to transcend--that I want to descend.

I want to entrench--to dig into the childhoods of my children, and to stop--right there. I want to melt at the feet of the children.

Sarah Vap does not simply write a poem, she reveals every facet of that writing and her thought process as she writes it. It is all jumbled together with the poem. It's like eating an omelet and finding the spatula that was used to make the omelet inside. She catalogs all her fears of motherhood:

and if their feet fell through the boards, their bodies would follow through easily but their heads would not fit--they would dangle there, stuck below the chin and the base of their skulls, until their necks snapped and they were dead.

She ponders her advice to students and tries to apply it to the writing of her own poems:

I often say to my students: what are you not writing about in your poem?

What's left out is important. But what's left out here? Not much. She's included: her every fear, her every worry about the world, her past, her family, an examination of her every body cavity, her place in the dying world, her children's future. And other people's children. She's trying not to forget about them who are currently being bombed. There's humor here too, but she's also always super-serious at the same time.

What I have left out of this book is

the exquisiteness of this time, in which I.

The I at the center of this poem-storm is strong willed and fearless but also vulnerable, fragile in ways. Fragmented, broken off, in mid speech. The I at the center is often left at the end of the line like a raw nerve.

[TaraShea Nesbit · Rating 5 out of 5]

WINTER. Oh my god.

Okay: a woman/mother/writer tries to write a poem of winter. She does not excise the daily interruptions that occur as any person sits down to think or write. It takes twelve years. The story/poem-making/living/grieving works with circular time. At the tops and bottoms of the pages are a phrase I'll let you discover for yourself, a phrase you perhaps read from page to page, and then at some point stop reading, and that PERFORMS more than anything Vap could say directly about the subjects the phrase describes. The outside worlds rushes inward, if there ever is an outside. Salmon try to cross logging roads. Babies are born, die, grow. Snow falls. Good strong coffee with a little cream.

All the adjectives and nouns and verbs here for this book will perhaps move you towards or against the book and not tell you, really, about all the beauty and luminance and pain here. I received the book yesterday and finished it this afternoon, reading between my children saying things like, "I wish my gymnastics coach hadn't died, Momma," and this feels exactly like how Vap might want a reader to experience it, as the speaker/narrator of this book exchanges the same kind of beauties and pains--our making as writers and the humans we love fiercely before us. This was the fastest book I've read in years, but also the book I wished I could read the slowest, for all the things within it. Starting back at the beginning this evening.


If you appreciated Dept of Speculation but wanted even more of the internal and humor as the plot of that book ramps up, this might be a book for you.

[Isla McKetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book so exquisitely captures what it is like to be a new mom trying to be a writer (or even a human) that I want to press it into the hands of all the mom writers I know.

[Roxanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was hard to read (especially perhaps during a pandemic in the winter) but only because it is so necessary. I am grateful for this book.

What’s interesting to me: the official book description here on goodreads doesn’t mention parenting, yet it’s a huge element of this book. I wonder if this was a deliberate choice, to try to market the book as “serious” literature rather than “women’s” literature? Vap makes the case in this book that women’s literature IS serious, vital, critical, and unflinching; this book has toddlers in it, but it’s anything but sentimental. I am deeply glad to have read it.

[Marianne Mersereau · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an engaging read that new mothers or mothers of any age who recall the intensity of parenting newborns and young children will especially appreciate. There is also a strong sense of place in the author's writing as she explores the connection between the natural environment and the family unit. A great book to read while curled up on the sofa in front of a fire!

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

trying to read this book in the bath while interrupted every few minutes by my 6yo, also in the bath... is in part what the book is about, along with climate change, state-sanctioned violence, and the slippery, layered, always-in-process self. I loved it.

[Mary B❤️❤️❤️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is claustrophobic, hopeful and terrified. i have been living this book most days since march.

[Jeffrey Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. Simply wonderful.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. Reverie, motherhood, the broken, intrusive world, the writing!

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a gift Sarah Vap has given us with this imperative collection of fragments. I am so glad that this book exists in the world. I feel like a more complete human having read it. Some of my favorite moments:

is my soul actually the raw nerve of some great wealth.

has this been a book, for all this time, about trying to hear.

if men get war, then I get abortion.

This book is a meditation on the ethics of killing my enemies.

we look like the monsters of heteronormativity.

Rulers of This World, you can't have maternity.

In order to think clearly, I need something that I don't have.

Snow exists somewhere between theory, art, and action.

I often tell my students who are hesitant to write about their own family: you have a loyalty problem.