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| VIRGINIA CHASE SUTTON | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In Virginia Chase Sutton's 'What Brings You To Del Amo' [poems] delight with their fresh imagry, vivid perceptions, unusual perspectives, and general liveliness, even when their subject is suffering. This book, in other words, is--to use a term not often applied to poetry-- a 'good read' ... I applaud the courage and the craft required to write this extraordinary collection. I recommend it to you heartily. Charles Harper Webb, Judge Samuel French Morse poetry prize 2007 |
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| Her prize winning book of poems, What Brings You To Del Amo, was published in October 2007 by University Press of New England. Her first book of poems, Embellishments, was published in Febuary 2003 by Chatoyant. Her poems have appeared in a number of literary publications including "Paris Review", "Ploughshares", "Antioch Review", "Boulevard", "Quarterly West", "Western Humanities Review", "Witness" and many other publications. Poems appear in recent anthologies "Are You Experienced?" (U of Iowa 2002) and "Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Poets on Tattoos, Tattoos on Poets" (Warner 2002), "Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets on Housework" (U of Iowa 2005), "Manthology: Poems From the Male Perspective" (U of Iowa 2006). She's been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman Award, Akron Poetry Prize, Morse Poetry Prize, New Issues Poetry Prize, Four Way Books, Levis Poetry Prize and many others. Five times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she has been the Louis Untermeyer Scholar at Bread Loaf, won first prize for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, has been a fellow at Writers at Work, was a winner for the Paumanock Visiting Writers Series, a winner in the National Poet Hunt, and other competitions. She has been a fellow at the Ragdale Foundation many times and once at Vermont Studio Center. She has received many grants for her teaching and writing from "Poets and Writers," Tempe Cultural Council, Arizona Humanities Council, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Scottsdale Cultural Council along with several Professional Development Grants. She's completed poetry manuscripts, "Reading Electra To Sleep," "Madame X." She is currently working on a memoir called "Famished" and a poetry collection title "Introducing the Varga Girl." | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Virginia Chase Sutton's evocations of memory are built of language so lavish and energetically wrought that remembering itself comes to seem a kind of spell: a painful, erotic, dizzying fascination that holds this speaker in thrall. Embellishments is a fierce, memorable debut. Mark Doty |
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| Face it: as much as we love to glorify and extol the powers of the imagination, there are some things you have to see up close and personal in order to be able to bring them into the rarified circumstance of a poem. These would include death, and even worse, all manner of human degradation and suffering possible. Still, bearing witness, no matter how intimate, is no guarantee of good art either. Virginia Chase Sutton manages, no, she illuminates a seamlessness between what is real, and what is barely imaginable in our lives with such precision that you are compelled to bear witness beside her. The poems of What Bring You To Del Amo are relentless in their pursuit of us, and relentless too in their pursuit of the highest level of craft and care. Bruce Weigl |
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| This is a book that looks the reader in the eye with tenderness. Sutton travels the road of small joys, slurred desire, and canyons of loss with an expansive diction that ranges from the lush and magical to the vernacular of the everyday. There is an amazing lack of shelter in these poems, as Sutton bravely illuminates loss in full color. The reader basks in the radiance of waiting for creation while surrounded by so much beauty--until we are full, full of the world and ready for combustion. Above all, this is a book about breath--and the breath of the measure, of a speaker who breathes in a clarity of vision and breathes out mad color with a sharpshooter's accuarcy of language. Her Poems will knock you alive. Jan Beatty |
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| 'Never construct narrative,' says a hospital shrink in Virginia Chase Sutton's riveting suite of poems, 'all you get are scraps.' But the marvel of Sutton's book is her ability to order a flashing series of scenes in order to tell, almost recklessly, not without hope, not without tenderness in the face of desolation, a life. A shattered life-- but the irony of that doctor's advice is that these fragments shored up against their speaker's ruin make, indeed, a coherent, vital testament, tenaciously alive. Mark Doty |
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| Virginia Chase Sutton's poems are intimate, lush and full of that rarest of human attributes--empathy. Embellishments takes as its subject a family in flux and examines the mystery of how we learn to love, even when love is not evenly returned. This is a moving, honest, restless, book that shows us how to survive in a world simultaneously ravaged and beautiful. Mark Wunderlich |
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| Virginia Chase Sutton is, perhaps above all else, a poet of exquisite detail so that her precise and sometimes even obsessive attention to the seemingly mundane aspects of our objective reality come alive in her poems, and shimmer in the light of understanding. There is a sense too that these poems have come to us as if from a place very far away and full of mortal danger, as if the poet has rescued not only her own self from loss and despair, but language itself, so that the language thoughout this highly accomplished first book is always fresh and vivid, the ordinary diction by which we curse and bless, love and hate on a daily basis, is resonant and restorative in its clarity and directness. This is not the poetry of victimhood, but rather, the clear and necessary poetry of witness. Bruce Weigl |
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| Eliot said, 'Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.' Jackknifed off the cliff of a desert life, tattoed onto the stretched skin of these pages, Sutton's history of inner turbulence amuses like a three-ring circus of gallows humor; rages, and circumgyrates through her psyche's raw picaresque that would throw a lesser poet to the mat. Reader, if you've got the chutzpah, this is the crossroads where imagination and art have a head-on with experience. This is the book. Roger Weingarten |
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| Embellishments is not only a knockout collection of beautifully rendered lyric/narratives nearly overflowing with heartstopping, eye-grabbing imaginative detail, it's a moving diorama of a difficult and fascinating family story that runs the gauntlet of contemporary life. Sutton exults in the physical made manifest through a richly textured, sensuous language-- and her short sentences come at you like a sucker punch. Roger Weingarten |
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