Arco Iris

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.