Sarah Vap's newest book is a stunning collection of beautiful and
frightening poems In her latest collection, Arco Iris, Sarah Vap
explores race, tourism, market, history, intimacy, and the vulnerability
of lives beneath the stamp of longstanding powers. Whiteness is
considered through the action of travel in South America where white
bodies disappear, or are invisible, or attempt to become irrelevant, or
are impossible to destroy. These hallucinatory poems explore the subtle
violence beneath the commonplace in a foreign land, a violence which
underscores the naiveté of the traveler. As she writes in the haunting
poem, "Trace" The white and gold // fairy dust left of some spent bomb /
settles // to the eyes of three children cuddling / in their hammock,
belly-level of our boat.