Down River by Virginia Chase Sutton
$14.99
“Sometimes still my father comes to me at night,” says the speaker in this harrowing collection; she feels his hands tap her body “as if I’m forever childhood’s furnace.” We all carry something of “childhood’s furnace” within us, but Down River chronicles the inner life of an adult for whom memory’s a permanent location of powerlessness and despair. In painfully awkward family scenes, in moments of adult life when the speaker’s “ready to bury my face in abandon,” in the psych ward where she repeats, “I’m in the here and now,” these honest and startling poems reveal themselves as acts of courage; meditations against “dreaming darkness.”
–Mark Doty
Virginia Chase Sutton’s poems in her new collection, Down River, are harrowing, haunting, and reveal the depths of longing that keeps life in play, sometimes against all odds. With what fierce concentration she is able to trace the shapes of pain and betrayal, and to render these with a precision sufficient to redeem the fractured self. Here suffering is not denied; the spirit rises to meet it and to affirm its own strength and integrity against what would break it. Sutton’s gaze does not falter. I would call this courage, yet it also feels like love. This is a beautiful book, richly imagined and deeply felt.
–Cynthia Huntington
In Virginia Chase Sutton’s, Down River, details of traumatic abuse create the force field that is this collection. The brilliant, suffering girl at the heart of these poems loves to escape into utopian fantasies and hide herself away beneath a flowering lilac tree all summer, because “I’m safe here, // enchanted.” As these poems richly confirm, she will—like Philomela—survive to make something beautiful out of the ugly truth (though survival very nearly costs her life itself). That contrast conjures the haunting testimony of this powerful and necessary collection.
–Cynthia Hogue
Description
Down River
by Virginia Chase Sutton
$14.99, paper
Virginia Chase Sutton’s third book of poetry, Of a Transient Nature, was published last year by Knut House Press. Her second book, What Brings You to Del Amo, won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was published by Northeastern / University Press of New England. Embellishments was her first book (Chatoyant). Sutton’s poems won her the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, and they have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Comstock Review, and Stoneboat, among many other magazines, journals, and anthologies. She lives in Tempe, Arizona with her husband.
Jeremy Spears –
This collection is beyond amazing. Painful, yes, thrilling, no doubt. Wonders within. I am a hard reader to please but this writer does it every time. Cheers to the bravest woman I have ever read.
Jeremy Spears –
This collection is beyond amazing. Terrifying, yes, thrilling, no doubt. There’s no other writer like Ms. Sutton. Cheers to the bravest I have ever read.
Jeremy Spears –
This collection is beyond amazing. This poet is tangled in rapture and danger, delivering beauty and insight. These poems have changed me. Cheers to the bravest writer I have ever read.
Kim Zukowski –
Virginia – Always wonderful!
Jami Macarty (verified owner) –
The poems in DOWN RIVER recount harrowing, awful familial abuse and neglect, but, and this is a big “but,” the worst imaginable has already happened at the advent of the poems. That’s important because these are the poems of a capital S survivor, but, and here’s another big “but,” she hasn’t only survived, she has made of her pain capital A art. This word-monument of Virginia Chase Sutton’s, written out of necessity to excise her hauntings, hurts to read like singing the blues hurts to hear.