That Other Life (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series )

Praise for That Other Life (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series )

“'I’ve built us a little nest,' Sutphen writes, 'here we will remain, and silence be the rest.' That Other Life is a nest of brilliant poems from a long creative life feathered with mothers-in-law, boyfriends, writers, wars, and losses. Sutphen is a great artist in her prime. Sonnets presented as couplets, her couplings hatch with the joys and challenges of love. Kindness is the tune from her nest. Kindness differs from nice; kindness endures and kindness takes work. Of kindness the world cannot have enough: what solace to have these wing-born lyrics—a book of hope."
— Spencer Reece, author of The Clerk’s Tale, The Road to Emmaus, and a book of watercolors, All The Beauty Still Left: A Poet’s Painted Book of Hours

"In Joyce Sutphen's latest, brilliant collection, she spins poems out of memory, dreams and longing into a book that dances and skips through time and space like a hummingbird. That Other Life is filled with homes remembered or dreamt of, pasts lived and not lived, possible futures, shimmering throughout with music, art, and references to beloved poets past and present. How lucky we are that Sutphen chose not other lives but her singular poet's life, one in which she—with her trademark gorgeous specificity—traces the arc of a life lived in love with life itself."
— Alison McGhee

"Through the many lives lived and imagined in That Other Life, Joyce Sutphen gives us a work to savor for a lifetime, a book to return to and share. Line by line she invites us to cross a new threshold, to stand 'in the doorway, listening, / as on an island in an old country—.' Every poem in this remarkably beautiful volume bears the mark of authenticity: integrity of voice and originality of vision, emotional power and subtle artistry, an equal commitment to clarity and mystery, language called forth by elemental experience and reflections that keep inflecting. Sutphen is a poet whose syntax can be as mercurial as the behavior of light on a leaf: 'What I did not know I did not have is / what I was looking for even when I // did not know what it was I did not have.' Radically open to vulnerability, to not knowing as much as knowing, she maintains faith in the world, blessing 'the one that surrounds us, / the one that causes such suffering / and refuses to let us go.'
— Phillis Levin