Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map - Hardcover

Sutter, Barton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816632596 ISBN 13: 9780816632596

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 1998

Synopsis

This is the author's temperamental tribute to the city of Duluth in northern Minnesota, where bears wander the streets and canoe racks are standard equipment. Sutter reports on the quirks and joys of daily life in this far-flung outpost and its environs.

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Product Description

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From the Publisher

A look at the everyday challenges of living in the north.
"Sutter knows Duluth and the hinterlands to the North the way Garrison Keillor knows Lake Wobegon and the prairies. With a nimble wit and a roving eye for detail, Sutter goes beneath the veneer of the North Country to expose its attraction, its quirks and its characters. But while Cold Comfort conveys a strong sense of place, for Sutter the North also serves as a backdrop for some poignant thoughts on life itself . . .There isn’t a clinker in the collection, and even if you’ve lived your entire life in Duluth or the Northern Country, you’ll see your home place with new insight after reading Cold Comfort." Duluth News-Tribune

"Sutter, an award-winning poet and fiction writer, sees Duluth with wide eyes and brings this vision to readers with brilliant crisp prose sure to resonate with anyone else who loves this beautiful, cold place "at the top of the map. In short, Bart Sutter wrote a book any Duluthian could have written in a way that very few could have written it. In the end, Cold Comfort challenges readers, bringing them face-to-face with their own lives, their own failures, the close proximity of their own mortality. Sutter approaches this topic with the same poetic touch and keen eye with which he approaches Duluth." Duluth Budgeteer News

"Sutter soberly but amusingly recounts long, deep winter months when all he can do midway throught the season is map fishing, an oddly humorous daydreaming of past expeditions. Mostly whimsical, sometimes meditative, but most often warmhearted, these essays—each a few pages long—explore Lake Superior, its neighboring rivers and streams, duck-hunting, cross country skiing, bridges, cider-pressing parties and camping out in the family car. Sutter’s prose is clean, straightforward and sometimes mirthful." Chicago New City

"You sense it in essay after essay: He knows it’s cold in Duluth, he knows it’s backward, he knows it’s crazy to live in a town where winter causes car tires to become square and freeze to the street—but, dang it, he lives here on purpose and he kind of loves it. Sutter, a poet and fiction writer who has lived in Duluth for 11 years, is a master of description. His words conjure vivid pictures." Minneapolsis/St. Paul Star Tribune

"Barton Sutter's Cold Comfort is an oddly brilliant and lovely little book, imbued with the true spirit of place but totally without the sense of regional xenophobia that currently afflicts us. This is Sutter's country and he tells us why, and also why nearly all of the rest of us wouldn't care for it. The book is resonant, evocative, and splendidly written." Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall

"Bart Sutter's vibrant, burning passion for a place is a golden spike, fixing his heart to Duluth, the Arrowhead, and Lake Superior. Ranging from the Duluth-Superior Dukes ‘quasi-semi-pro’ baseball team to the demonic speed of a merlin hawk to a stand of birches he compares to 'a flock of nurses . . . getting off work,' the passion in Cold Comfort is broad and deep, lyrical and earthy." Faith Sullivan, author of The Empress of One

"The only thing cold in these finely written and warmhearted essays is the wind coming off the big lake Sutter calls ‘God.’ Though he tries hard to be a curmudgeon, delight—in seedy places, unlikely humans, the grand ordinariness of things—keeps breaking through on every page." Bill Holm, author of The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth

"Barton Sutter is something of a crank. A certain skepticism and irascibility comes through in his writing. It is his crankiness, I think, that prevents the essays in Cold Comfort, which are about a particular part of the country that he loves, from ever becoming sentimental. This crankiness gives the essays their oddness, their wit, and the sharpness of the northern winter air." Louis Jenkins, author of Nice Fish

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816632596
• ISBN 13: 9780816632596
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160