Dummy Fire

Dummy Fire is a book full of surprises, its arms wide enough to encircle, it seems, all of creation, from the deeply personal to the existential. In Sarah Vap's debut book a mother's nose bleeds into tomato soup and a great blue heron is vivisected on a dinner table. There is nothing she is afraid to say. "Sarah Vap," writes Forrest Gander, "combines an utterly unsentimental domestic tenderness with an attentiveness to the lives of plants and animals that never approaches 'nature poetry' because it never seems separated from that realm." And Norman Dubie adds, "she is brilliant and something entirely new under our sun."

SARAH VAP is the author of American Spikenard (University of Iowa Press, 2007), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, written after Dummy Fire but released the same year. She lives in Phoenix, AZ, where she teaches public schools for the Young Writers Program at Arizona State University.