Winter: Effulgences & Devotion
It is thrilling to be reading Sarah Vap's Winter, as I happen to be just now. It is a book of thrilling beauty. Pain. Curiosity. Intimacy. Motherhood. Death. Ecstatic joy. Violence and resistance to violence. Above all, or at the center of all, the maternal body, and "the astonishing porousness that motherhood has created." Around her, the awesome and awful and endangered world, in language slick as ice melting, fluid as milk straight from the nursing animal. Sarah Vap is one of the finest and fiercest writers of her generation.
- Alicia Ostriker, author of The Mother/Child Papers
The world is ending; or the world is always ending; or the worlds within the world are continually ending: this is what Sarah Vap’s Winter so hauntingly teaches. Winter is a deep and arresting disclosure of interruption, rupture, and letting go. The world does not put itself back together again; the ending resists. In Vap’s world, the world in which the world is ending and in which life is continually interrupted by drones and other corporate killers, Vap takes us deep into the minute details that make a world, into motherhood and its existential complications, showing how love and tenderness are privileges over which we have no control and no way to keep or hold. There is only the letting go. In haunting and shifting and vibrant prose, Vap displays what it is to be interrupted, to see the thing one loves slowly and suddenly go out of the world. To read Winter is to tread deep and deeper and deeper still into a terrifying yet sublime vortex.
- Jenny Boully, author of The Body: An Essay
In the winter poems, I’m usually staring out the window, like this, watching the snow or the rain— many of them just a few words before I.” It’s the “few words” that stand before an I, a self, a system, and a world that must become self-reflexive and also world-reflexive. The poems analyze systems and how we, as poets, take ourselves into a new theorizing of how words work, and our encounters with pauses, hesitance, and affirmation of the self and the I as it situates us in an unsteady place in an unsettled violent and power-driven world that we try our best to settle as we stare into it. Sarah Vap’s Winter achieves, through discourse, description, a lyric will, and attentive stamina of documentation, the struggles with death, grief, loss, finding place, defining family, and the precarity of systems imposed on our collective will: elite, bohemian, domestic, familial, marginal, pedagogical, sentimental, and anti-sentimental that somehow invariably define us. These are the themes, discoveries, and experiments of how voice and poetry may, in some ways, go deeper into these states of being. How are we immersed in class-struggle and changing culture identifiers, its intersection with gender and race, and particularly the labor of women and in their marked roles of being a writer and a mother. I linger over so many poems and lines here. I marvel that the use of the first person declares so much of the beyond: of how “the longevity of this profoundest interruption, I” is the longevity of “a book about how to remember something—how to remind oneself. How to re-create one’s own mind” as it articulates the politics of writing in the past and how we arrive at several turbulent and differing decades where the self must insist on seeing the winter of the present moment, of war and the bodies it overpowers.
- Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence
It is thrilling to be reading Sarah Vap's Winter, as I happen to be just now. It is a book of thrilling beauty. Pain. Curiosity. Intimacy. Motherhood. Death. Ecstatic joy. Violence and resistance to violence. Above all, or at the center of all, the maternal body, and "the astonishing porousness that motherhood has created." Around her, the awesome and awful and endangered world, in language slick as ice melting, fluid as milk straight from the nursing animal. Sarah Vap is one of the finest and fiercest writers of her generation.
- Alicia Ostriker, author of The Mother/Child Papers
The world is ending; or the world is always ending; or the worlds within the world are continually ending: this is what Sarah Vap’s Winter so hauntingly teaches. Winter is a deep and arresting disclosure of interruption, rupture, and letting go. The world does not put itself back together again; the ending resists. In Vap’s world, the world in which the world is ending and in which life is continually interrupted by drones and other corporate killers, Vap takes us deep into the minute details that make a world, into motherhood and its existential complications, showing how love and tenderness are privileges over which we have no control and no way to keep or hold. There is only the letting go. In haunting and shifting and vibrant prose, Vap displays what it is to be interrupted, to see the thing one loves slowly and suddenly go out of the world. To read Winter is to tread deep and deeper and deeper still into a terrifying yet sublime vortex.
- Jenny Boully, author of The Body: An Essay
In the winter poems, I’m usually staring out the window, like this, watching the snow or the rain— many of them just a few words before I.” It’s the “few words” that stand before an I, a self, a system, and a world that must become self-reflexive and also world-reflexive. The poems analyze systems and how we, as poets, take ourselves into a new theorizing of how words work, and our encounters with pauses, hesitance, and affirmation of the self and the I as it situates us in an unsteady place in an unsettled violent and power-driven world that we try our best to settle as we stare into it. Sarah Vap’s Winter achieves, through discourse, description, a lyric will, and attentive stamina of documentation, the struggles with death, grief, loss, finding place, defining family, and the precarity of systems imposed on our collective will: elite, bohemian, domestic, familial, marginal, pedagogical, sentimental, and anti-sentimental that somehow invariably define us. These are the themes, discoveries, and experiments of how voice and poetry may, in some ways, go deeper into these states of being. How are we immersed in class-struggle and changing culture identifiers, its intersection with gender and race, and particularly the labor of women and in their marked roles of being a writer and a mother. I linger over so many poems and lines here. I marvel that the use of the first person declares so much of the beyond: of how “the longevity of this profoundest interruption, I” is the longevity of “a book about how to remember something—how to remind oneself. How to re-create one’s own mind” as it articulates the politics of writing in the past and how we arrive at several turbulent and differing decades where the self must insist on seeing the winter of the present moment, of war and the bodies it overpowers.
- Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence