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jimmylorunning's review against another edition
4.0
I am spreading my butt cheeks as far apart as I can to reveal something, ISarah 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 enemiesAt 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.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:
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.
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 isThe 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.
the exquisiteness of this time, in which I.
hanvanderhart's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Miscarriage and Violence
Minor: Sexual violence and Violence
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