Winter: Effulgences & Devotions

In Winter: Effulgences and Devotions, Sarah Vap documents the obstacles to writing a single poem over a twelve-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.   Sarah Vap grew up in Missoula, Montana. She attended Brown University, where she studied English and Am