Vanitas Motel Author:Jon Loomis 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.