American Spikenard

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."" Pan of crayons and candles, trusting in them the solidarity. Or in her - she's free not to care any longer. To put out pumpkins for the bear. But which lover was it kissed her in his sleep? Put her in a river to cool down. There's a reduceless feeling: that womankind dropped her memory. That six folded-around interstates make a city's red chakra and I'm sorry it wasn't me dropped since she touched the chair of anger that shares a wall with the ground of bearings. Dyslexia makes her holy ghost polyglot. In the history of disclosures we think we're all stretched out next to her, but there she goes calling kitty kitty at the on-ramp.