American Spikenard

Author Sarah Vap

“If everyone decided to call themselves a girl / that word would stop.” In this award-winning volume of authoritative and assertive poems, Sarah Vap embarks on an emotional journey to the land of America’s female children. Questioning, contradicting, radically and restlessly demanding acceptance, she searches for a way to move from serious girlhood to womanly love. Demonstrating the seriousness of female childhood — which is as dangerous and profound as war, economics and history, that is, as manhood, in her view — Vap reveals the extremes of self-doubt and self-righteousness inherent in being a contemporary American girl.

“When we’re overcome / by everything we think we love — then by morning / we’re adults.” Just as the oil of American spikenard may provide relief from childhood, so does Sarah Vap provide the kind of holy and extravagant love and honor that can relieve the growing pains of “everyone’s little girl.”

Bio

Sarah Vap earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from ASU in 2005.


Praise for this book

Sarah Vap’s poems are stunningly voiced, bristling with drive and energy. Her rich and inhabited landscapes thrive on her tough, relentlessly probing, questioning, and wide-ranging diction. 'American Spikenard' is like one long poem, a poet’s coming to terms with identity and history in a quest to be acknowledged for exactly who she is.

Ira Sadoff, author of "Barter"
Cover of "American Spikenard" featuring an image of a porcelain figure
Date published
Publisher
University Of Iowa Press
ISBN
978-1587295355

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