Winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize selected by Forrest
Gander, this is poet Sarah Vap's first full-length poetry collection.
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."