Description: Things happen in Vanitas Motel: a funeral, a fistfight, an outburst at a poetry reading. Its poems are surreal parables, at once funny and dark, sensual and deeply serious. Their revealed subjects are loss, art, illness and desire. Vanitas Motel is the first collection by Jon Loomis, and the winner of the 1997 FIELD Poetry Prize.
Review Quotes: "Jon Loomis's poems veer deftly and ironically between the sacramental and the sordid, with a wonderful economy of expression and sinuousness of line."