Sarah Vap

Contributor Update, Sara Sams

Superstition Review

Join Superstition Review in congratulating one of our past faculty advisors, Sara Sams, on her forthcoming book, Atom City, out May 14th. Atom City is a collection of poems exploring the topic of the atomic bomb and The Manhattan Project’s creation of the city Oak Ridge. Inspired by historian Peter Bacon Hales’ Atomic Spaces, Sara’s work takes the perspective of an observer contemplating and witnessing such concepts as, “the rhetoric of the Manhattan Engineering District, the militarization of scientific conversations, the mythologized stories of the local residents of Oak Ridge Valley before it was condemned, the use of such myths to underscore the morality of the bomb, current exhibits at the American Museum of Science and Energy, [her] own family’s participation in the Project and the stories they’ve hot-potato’d since, the atomification of so much of [her] hometown (including [her] high school’s logo), and so on.”

“Sara Sams’ Atom City shows us what violence and invisible interiority and tenderness is at the core of the American Hometown.

Sarah Vap, author of Viability

Click here to pre-order Atom City. Be sure to also check out Sara’s website and Twitter, as well as, Issue 22, in which she helped create and advised on.

Contributor Update, Sarah Vap

Contributor Update, Sarah Vap

Superstition Review

Join us in congratulating Sarah Vap on her book, Winter: Effulgences and Devotions. It is available from Noemi Press here. Recently, Cutbank has done an extensive interview with Sarah discussing Winter, talking about where the book sprung from and the process of its creation.

Winter is the product of years of work, documenting Sarah’s struggle to write a single poem while she confronts other thoughts, raises her family, and forces herself to remember to remember the world at large.

To learn more about Sarah and her work you can visit her website. You can also read our interview with her, “Writing Out of My Own Life!—Sort of” featured in Issue 13 of Superstition Review.

Congratulations Sarah!

Contributor Update: Sarah Vap

Superstition Review

Past contributor Sarah Vap was recently featured on the literary podcast, Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People). Sarah Vap bio pictureRachel Zucker interviews Sarah about upcoming manuscripts, her writing as craft, and her panel at this year’s AWP. You can listen to the conversation here.

Sarah was also featured on the Speedway and Swan podcast with guest host Susan Briante. You can listen to that conversation here, where they discuss the many forms that poetry can take.

Sarah’s interview with Superstition Review can be found in issue 13 here.

#ArtLitPhx: MFA Reading Series – Sarah Vap, Dexter L. Booth, and Patricia Colleen Murphy

Superstition Review

MFA Reading Series - ASUPoets Sarah Vap, Dexter L. Booth, and Patricia Colleen Murphy will read from their recent work at Hayden Library on the Tempe Campus as part of the MFA Alumni Reading Series, presented by ASU’s Creative Writing Program. The event takes place on Thursday, September 22nd. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the reading begins at 7:00 p.m. A book signing and reception with light refreshments will follow the reading.

Sarah Vap received her MFA from Arizona State University. Vap is the author of six collections of poetry. Her most recent book, Viability, was selected by Mary Jo Bang for the National Poetry Series, and was released by Penguin in 2016.

Dexter L. Booth earned an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University. His collection Scratching the Ghost was selected by Major Jackson for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Patricia Colleen Murphy, a graduate of ASU’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University, where she teaches creative writing and magazine production. Her collection, Hemming Flames, was selected by Stephen Dunn for the May Swenson Poetry Award.

The event is free of charge and is open to the public. For more information please visit the ASU page and/or the Facebook event.

Hemming Flames Now Available

Superstition Review

Patricia Colleen MurphyWe at Superstition Review are very pleased to announce that our founding editor, Patricia Colleen Murphy, recently had her first collection of poetry, Hemming Flames, published by Utah State University Press. Hemming Flames was chosen by Stephen Dunn as the winner of the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award.

 

Hemming FlamesThroughout this haunting first collection, Patricia Colleen Murphy shows how familial mental illness, addiction, and grief can render even the most courageous person helpless. With depth of feeling, clarity of voice, and artful conflation of surrealist image and experience, she delivers vivid descriptions of soul-shaking events with objective narration, creating psychological portraits contained in sharp, bright language and image. With Plathian relentlessness, Hemming Flames explores the deepest reaches of family dysfunction through highly imaginative language and lines that carry even more emotional weight because they surprise and delight. In landscapes as varied as an Ohio back road, a Russian mental institution, a Korean national landmark, and the summit of Kilimanjaro, each poem sews a new stitch on the dark tapestry of a disturbed suburban family’s world.

 

Patricia has two upcoming readings:

Thursday September 1st at 7 pm she will be reading with Sarah Vap at Changing Hands Tempe.

Thursday September 22nd at 7 pm she will be reading with Sarah Vap and Dexter Booth at ASU’s Hayden Library.

 

On August 20th, Four Chambers Press held a book release for Hemming Flames. If you missed it, you can watch it here.

 

The book is available from Amazon. For more information about the book, please visit its website.