Winter

In "Winter: Effulgences and Devotions," Sarah Vap documents the obstacles to writing a single poem over a 12-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.