Viability
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Selected as a Winner of the National Poetry Series by Mary Jo Bang
Sarah Vap’s sixth work of poetry, Viability is an ambitious and highly imaginative collection of prose poems that braids together several kinds of language strands in an effort to understand and to ask questions about the bodies (and minds, maybe even souls) that are owned by capitalism. These threads of language include definitions from an online financial dictionary, samples from an essay on the economics of slavery, quotations from an article about slavery in today’s Thai fishing industry, lyric bits and pieces about pregnancy and infants of all kinds, and a wealth of quotations falsely attributed to John of the Cross. The viability that Vap is asking about is primarily economic and biological (but not only). The questions of viability become entwined with the need, across the book, to “increase”—in both a capitalist and a gestational sense. John of the Cross tries, at first with composure, to comment on or to mediate between all the different strands of the collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her sixth collection, a National Poetry series winner as selected by Mary Jo Bang, Vap (End of The Sentimental Journey) innovatively mediates language of the body membranes, tonsils, embryos, and blood through prose poems in an imaginative structure based on the rhizome. Operating in the shadow of capitalism, Vap pulls jargon from the Thai fishing industry, the history of American slavery, and the finance world, among other sources, mixing it with lyric lines about motherhood and fake quotations from John of the Cross. The tension, connection, and contrast among the diverse vocabularies thread this dynamic and playful collection together. The Global Financial Centres Index figures prominently as a metaphorical figure, with Vap poking fun at spectacular capitalism via the "Lindsay Lohan Stock Index" and such other items as Keynesian animal spirits and the bikini. It is through this style of ongoing juxtaposition that she questions capitalism's power, and it is particularly noticeable in her women-centered humor: "Put hairspray into the lungs of the rate. Where there is no love, put lipstick on abstract animals." By the end of her rigorous and elastic exploration, Vap asserts and asks: "The rhizome we need is inhuman... Index, is this who you are. Is this what you are pointing us toward." Vap points readers toward a different index, asking them to imagine another possible world.
