Saturnalia Books

80 pgs/ $15

Wind from the water on my legs, my white skirt smeared with dirt, the wine, and the / lime leaf caught in your beard- we had decided to travel.

Sarah Vap’s Arco Iris (Spanish, meaning “rainbow”) is a collection that allows Vap psychic space to interrogate her months-long trip through South America with a beloved. Though Vap does include several pieces illustrating wonder, as well as vignettes of what they see, this is predominantly (and thus far more interestingly) a book considering the “ghosts” that haunt the couple and the anxieties of globalization. One of Vap’s epigraphs is from Artaud- “Everything that acts is cruelty,” underscoring the impossibility of avoiding the act of harming. This angst around injuring is driven by the feeling of recklessness such traveling engages in, as illustrated in the poem “As if we are two hemispheres folding onto each other”:

We are two
people who have never wanted to do wrong or to think anything wrong

or to say anything wrong and now all we do is smash continents and bodies together to see what will remain.

In another poem, “We are feeling good. We aren’t hurting anyone/Everywhere we go, our minds think, we aren’t hurting anyone.” These both attempt to comprehend the couple’s arguably uncritical view of their travels, but also the narrator’s intertwining with the beloved through travel. Vap describes the latter most beautifully and effectively in”Train, Cuzo-Puno,” which I wish I could quote in full:

I wanted to expose myself to everything while it exposes itself to me.

…I wanted all other bodies in mine I wanted all the substance opened I did this

by way of you on a train and while I did I pounded my head

my head against yours. Continue reading →