Down River by Virginia Chase Sutton

“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