Joyce Sutphen

A luminous collection of modern metaphysical poems. This Long Winter contains poems that are meditations on life in the rural world: reflections on hard work, ageing, and the ravages of time—erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language. These poems move us from delight in precise description to wisdom and solace in the things of this...

Poems that deftly draw on the sonnet form to follow the speaker’s romantic life. That Other Life is a narrative about how relationships fail and succeed—or rather, about how the narrator fares on the changeable course of love and domestic commerce. Most of the poems in Joyce Sutphen’s twelfth book are sonnets, and each sonnet provides a glimpse of a...