So Surprised to Find You Here: Poems - Softcover

Sutter, Bart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1947237489 ISBN 13: 9781947237483

Publisher: Nodin Press, 2022

Synopsis

Bart Sutter's new poems embody a series of surprises. Why should a walk through a woodland bog call up the names and faces of first-grade girls? What's it like to be a one-year-old who's crawled beneath a grand piano while it's being played? Or an arborist, sky-high up a tree, who's suddenly attacked by killer bees? How come a Lutheran congregation worships at a boulder in the woods? Isn't this what poetry is for--situations, people, moments that take us by surprise and will not let us go?

Now in his seventies, Sutter is haunted by lost friends and places, so this book has an elegiac undertone which only heightens the celebrations--of kelp on a California beach, a sexual awakening, a grandson's messy mastery of solid food. The book is rich with stories, and their settings range from the poet's home ground in northern Minnesota to the backroads of New Mexico, to Ireland and Spain.

At home, as well as in his travels, Sutter finds those transcendent moments that keep us going, despite our disappointments and discouragements.

About this title

About the Author

Bart Sutter received the Minnesota Book Award for poetry with The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems, for fiction with My Father's War and Other Stories, and for creative non-fiction with Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map. Among other honors, he has won a Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant (Sweden), a Loft-McKnight Award, and the Bassine Citation from the Academy of American Poets. In 2006, he was named the first Poet Laureate of Duluth. He has written for public radio, he has had four verse plays produced, and he often performs as one half of The Sutter Brothers, a poetry-and-music duo. Bart Sutter lives on a hillside overlooking Lake Superior with his wife, Dorothea Diver.

Edition details

• Publisher: Nodin Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1947237489
• ISBN 13: 9781947237483
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 142