For full-color edition, see createspace.com/5978676. Virginia Chase Sutton's book Of a Transient Nature was a finalist for the 2015 Knut House Poetry Prize and features original artwork by painter Philip Neil Mandel. About the Author Virginia Chase Sutton's poetry book What Brings You to Del Amo won the Morse Poetry Prize, and was published by the University Press of New England. Her first book Embellishments was published by Chatoyant. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, and Quarterly West, among many other magazines, journals, and anthologies. Her poems have won the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry at Bread Loaf and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. She lives in Tempe, Arizona. This collection Of a Transient Nature, containing original artwork in collaboration with painter Philip Neil Mandel, was a finalist for the 2015 Knut House Poetry Prize and published in February 2016. Advance Praise for Of a Transient Nature "Virginia Chase Sutton's brave new book is concerned with pleasure, though not in any usual sense of the word . . . : these are accounts of a speaker compelled to seek solace in a body long-ago betrayed, forced to re-enact the loss of self she learned first at her father's hands. The hard truth of these poems is that pleasure is pleasure, even when it keeps us trapped in painful repetitions, even when it destroys us: the body wants to be touched, to be brought to rapture: "Admit it. Almost hallucinogenic these forays into rapture, the turn of a hand. / someone's salty kiss . . ." The woman we meet here tattoos on her back the Japanese characters for suffering, ecstasy and death; she is not afraid to put her hands into the fire where she first learned love, where harm and desire dwell intertwined, and not afraid to hope, or to take us with her into the depths of the days she's known." - Mark Doty, winner of the 2008 National Book Award "The poems in Virginia Chase Sutton's new collection, Of a Transient Nature, are haunting and beautiful. Sensuous and gritty, they speak of longing and desire. Language and image and narrative combine to create a tremendously touching collection about the worlds we try to escape and the ones we try to imagine. Above all, these are poems about the persistence of the human spirit and what it takes to embrace our lives. I'm very glad that I've had the chance to know them." - Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever

Of a Transient Nature (Black & White)

Literature & Fiction

Sutton, Virginia Chase

Poetry

Knut House Press

Embellishments is Virginia Chase Sutton's first book. Full of raw, powerful reflections from her life, Sutton tackles the demons of her childhood and their continuing presence in her adult life. Yet this finely written verse avoids the heaviness of "issue" writing --- the magically realized experiences in these pages offer us a story worth reading.

Embellishments

Chatoyant

Virginia Chase Sutton's What Brings You to Del Amo is, by turns, both terrifying and comic. This collection of poems presents a vigilantly examined life, wringing wry and knowing but never smug composure from private and institutional experiences of mental illness, while also reminding us that the gap between extreme and ordinary states is often an illusion. Introducing the volume, Charles Harper Webb writes, "Sutton's poems . . . delight with their fresh imagery, vivid perceptions, unusual perspectives, and general liveliness, even when their subject is suffering." Sutton welcomes her readers with bright imagery and high energy so that they will eagerly tag along, very glad for the wild ride. Webb states that this book,"in other words, is--to use a term not often applied to poetry--a good read." The poems,"also explore less frequently chronicled aspects of mental illness, including the comedy, sexual highs/lows, manic elation--'this glory'-- of their bipolar narrator's life."Webb concludes, "I applaud the courage and craft required to write this extraordinary collection. I recommend it to you heartily."

What Brings You to Del Amo (Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize)

Northeastern University Press

A haunting and harrowing collection of the inner life of a speaker, both as child and as adult, Down River contains, according to poet Mark Doty, “honest and startling poems that reveal themselves as acts of courage; meditations against ‘dreaming darkness.’” This is a speaker who lives in the pain of childhood sexual abuse, the terror of mental illness, all within painful family secrets that haunt and “chronicle (s) the inner life of an adult,” according to Doty. This “fractured self,” writes poet Cynthia Huntington, allows the speaker’s spirit to “affirm its own strength and integrity against what would break it.” This “traumatic abuse,” says poet Cynthia Hogue, creates a “haunting testimony of this powerful and necessary collection.”

Down River

Finishing Line Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sutton, Virginia Chase. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sutton, Virginia Chase

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sutton, Virginia Chase. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Of a Transient Nature (Black & White)

Embellishments

What Brings You to Del Amo (Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize)

Down River