Sarah Vap is the author of Dummy Fire, winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by Forrest Gander. Her second collection, American Spikenard, was the winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2006. Her most recent collection is Faulkner's Rosary, published by Saturnalia Books in 2010. She is currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, and lives in Santa Monica.

Other poems by Author Name in Verse Daily:
November 30, 2010:   "Reconcile" "The earliest light we know..."
May 16, 2007:   "Horse-Boat" " there can only be intelligence..."

Books by Sarah Vap:

Other poems on the web by Sarah Vap:
"Solar system bedsheets"
Seven poems
Three poems
Five poems
Three poems

Sarah Vap's Website.

About Arco Iris:

"travelogue, love story, fairy tale, and reportage. Sarah Vap's Arco Iris travels down the rabbit hole to South America. Her speaker visits the graves we've helped dig, and the bright landscapes we've long mined for wonder. She tries to buy absolution in the market, she tries to buy a cup of coffee. She reminds us that we can't tour history, which already owns us, and we can't haggle our way out of bloodshed. Even the gentlest touch leaves a bruise, which bruise is all that keeps us from radically lonesome isolation. Every last longing for human contact becomes a ghost that floats beside. This is the pact made by two people who have never wanted to be wrong or to think anything wrong. This is love. This is the chance to drown each other before we drown in the river."
—Daniella Pafunda

"'We had decided to travel'—so begins Sarah Vap's Arco Iris. But then: 'Everywhere we go, our minds think, we aren't hurting anyone.' This is a book that will make you think—and feel—about consumption, about wandering, about dominance and submission, about memory and haunting. In her narrative about a lovers' trek through South America (by boat, by train, by bus, on foot), Vap explores what it means to be a member of the 'first world' traveling in a rough Eden, tainted by imperialism. This book confounds the personal and the cultural and the spiritual with sexy nuances. True to its title: a rainbow."
—Kathleen Ossip