Coming Back to the Body

Scenes of the family farm, Paris, London, a dying marriage, stories of plain exaltation and ordinary weariness, seen with a clear and compassionate eye-it eases your heart to read Joyce Sutphen.-Garrisonn Keillor

Keenly attentive, quietly ruthless-Coming Back to the Body is a work of hard groundings, rocky losses, cherished recoveries. This deeply rooted American book homesteads memories, harvests the present, and radiates a rare heart knowledge.-Edward Hirsch

Joyce Sutphen is a modern metaphysical poet. The elegance and originality of her wit recall Marvell, Donne, Shakespeare, through her subjects-memory, love, family, death-are timeless. Her poems are like still lifes that refuse to be still. One is charmed. One is hypnotized. The poems in Coming Back to the Body are so various that whatever we seek we will find: consolation, enlightenment, undiluted delight.-Connie Wanek

Photosynthesis

Morning falls out of its orbit
and swims up through the blue.
Last night, when I heard the news,
I forgot my human hunger.

Now I am making calculations
with a row of ivy and old hibiscus.
I am silent as a shadow in the ferns,
I am frond green and curled.

It may be necessary to drink through
the roots; I could eat sunlight and air,
start a green factory in each finger;
I could make each arm a branch.

Let me begin as stem and leaf.
I'll make something you can breathe.