American Spikenard

Publication Year: 2007

2006 Iowa Poetry Prize winner

“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.”

Published by: University of Iowa Press

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pp. viii-ix

Acknowledgments

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pp. xi-

With deep gratitude for my teachers Norman Dubie, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Jeannine Savard, and Cynthia Hogue, for their help with these poems. Thank you to Arizona State University’s creative writing program and to Karla Elling, for giving me the time and the support needed to write this book...

E-ISBN-13: 9781587297724
E-ISBN-10: 1587297728
Print-ISBN-13: 9781587295355
Print-ISBN-10: 1587295350

Page Count: 94
Publication Year: 2007

Edition: pb
Series Title: Iowa Poetry Prize

American Spikenard

Contents

Acknowledgments

Testify

Second Daughter

Stallions eat flowers

Winter Necromancer

Star Light

Teaching you

brothers, sisters –

Sauna Morning

What position you’re in if you’re looking at the sole of a heel.

Being a Great Believer in Cooling

What I remember of it now.

Urging caution, and suchlike

Kunsthistorisches Museum

Little Clouds on Teeth

Little girls and horses

Blue-Eyed Horse

Teacup

The disappearing movement

Just look:

A platform

Something of an award

Take them in and throw them back up.

Please come

A riddle for my birthday

I am surprised, that means

Mexican Blanket

Ease

Breastfeeding across America

Tweeting the Midnight Line

The Emergency Chair

For Romell, the boy with the hair between his teeth

Cold red tiles. Red-hot bath.

Horses Remember How

Heartbreakingly small when you sleep

No one knows the honest end or beginning

I can barely lift you

The Pink House

Push-off Sideways

The Path of Birds

A Window the Size of a Granny’s Forehead

How secret and good you are –

Men from the women

Originally, the earth was loving-water

Iris enjoys the secret

Are you expressing a desire to know me?

Lesson Plan

Oh come on now.

Pressure-Ridges

Chakra

You help your cat “ face its fear”

Festivals

Speech of my lost twin

Tiger, my Birthday

The Love Story of Monkey and Bear: Aerial Map

My attention

Mark Time

Night Bath, Sagittarius

The Cow Can’t Fear Something Eternal

The Silting-Up

Research Areas

Recommend

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