Dummy Fire

Dummy Fire is a riveting book, remarkable for its ferocious economy of form, its landscape-haunted, but wide-ranging field of reference, and its explosive implication. The poems often have the pressurized inventiveness of a curse or a protective spell and like a curse or spell, they lay bare the vulnerabilities of the body. Sarah Vap 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. With its laconic, purposively innovative adjustments of language, Dummy Fire stands out. Forrest Gander