Chatoyant

Virginia Chase Sutton's evocations of memory are built of language so lavish and energetically wrought that remembering itself comes to seem a kind of spell: a painful, erotic, dizzying fascination that holds this speaker in thrall. Embellishments is a fierce, memorable debut.

- Mark Doty

Virginia Chase Sutton's poems are intimate, lush and full of that rarest of human attributes---empathy. Embellishments takes as its subject a family in flux and examines the mystery of how we learn to love, even when love is not evenly returned. This is a moving, honest, restless book that shows us how to survive in a world simultaneously ravaged and beautiful.

- Mark Wunderlich

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. [Read a press release with more information about Virginia Chase Sutton - PDF] [View Virginia's website] (Release date: February, 2003. ISBN: 0-9661452-5-9. US$12.00)

ORDERING INFORMATION

Chatoyant no longer fulfills retail orders. To order Chatoyant books, special order from your local bookstore (supply the ISBN and specify Baker & Taylor as the wholesaler).

Virginia Chase Sutton is, perhaps above all else, a poet of exquisite detail so that her precise and sometimes even obsessive attention to the seemingly mundane aspects of our objective reality come alive in her poems, and shimmer in the light of understanding. There is a sense too that these poems have come to us as if from a place very far away and full of mortal danger, as if the poet has rescued not only her own self from loss and despair, but language itself, so that the language throughout this highly accomplished first book is always fresh and vivid, the ordinary diction by which we curse and bless, love and hate on a daily basis, is resonant and restorative in its clarity and directness. This is not the poetry of victimhood, but rather, the clear and necessary poetry of witness.

- Bruce Weigl

This is a book that looks the reader in the eye with tenderness. Sutton travels the roads of small joys, slurred desire, and canyons of loss with an expansive diction that ranges from the lush and magical to the vernacular of the everyday. There is an amazing lack of shelter in these poems, as Sutton bravely illuminates loss in full color. The reader basks in the radiance of waiting for creation while surrounded by so much beauty---until we are full, full of the world and ready for combustion. Above all, this is a book about breath---the breath of the measure, of a speaker who breathes in clarity of vision and breathes out mad color with a sharpshooter's accuracy of language. Her poems will knock you alive.

- Jan Beatty

Embellishments is not only a knockout collection of beautifully rendered lyric/narratives nearly overflowing with heartstopping, eye-grabbing imaginative detail, it's a moving diorama of a difficult and fascinating family story that runs the gauntlet of contemporary life. Sutton exults in the physical made manifest through a richly textured, sensuous language---and her short sentences come at you like a sucker punch.

- Roger Weingarten

Sutton Creates muscular, haunting poems out of the spell of words themselves. Though her poems are narrative in structure, they are lush, sensuous, and richly detailed. In many, the process of remembering becomes a kind of spell, driven by an intense lyricism that seduces the reader.

- Alison Townsend
The Women's Review of Books

Embellishments News: Embellishments is "a book of poems written with steady gaze and breath-taking clarity" -- review by Peggy Miller in the Comstock Review. A fine review of Embellishments appeared on the Emerging Writers Forum. Embellishments was reviewed by Alison Townsend in the Women's Review of Books in their April 2004 issue. There's a nice review of the anthology Tattoos on Writers: Writers on Tattoos (edited by Kim Addonizio) in SFStation Magazine. The writer mentions Virginia's contribution to the anthology. Embellishments was chosen by Small Press Review as one of their March-April 2003 "Picks". Thanks!

Virginia Chase Sutton's poem "Waiting Up" won honorable mention in the "Art in the Air" Poetry Contest. You can read the poem at http://www.inventingtheinvisible.com/losspoems.html.

Press the above book thumbnail
to view a large version of the cover.

IN THE FITTING ROOM

of this swanky lingerie shop, a girl
is learning all the possibilities

of desire. An elderly saleslady offers
instructions, tells her how to bend
and shimmy her breasts into the bonded

stiffness of the lace trimmed bra.
It doesn't fit. But the girl loves

the tiny crimson appliqué rose, hidden
like a blush between the cups, small
as a secret. The bra's band has tightened

until each breath is cut in half, sharp
as the snap of taffeta. Her new breasts

rise above the crackling fabric,
luminous ovals unwilling for this,
or any kind of confinement. Her mother sighs,

hating the rush of half-grown roundness
gleaming above her daughter's body. How

she scorns this turn to flesh, the thickening
of arms and belly, the thighs spilling flesh.
She has watched and watched the slow boil

of her daughter's skin, this baby who only
grew fatter. She propped bottles against

the infant's small chest, formula washing down
in torrents. Drained and emptied. But the mother
doesn't know what the girl realized years

ago: it was either swallow or drown. Now
the mother's cigarette has narrowed to a butt.

Everyone looks in the mirror. The artificial
pulse of spandex and rubber mixed and tugged
beneath the mother's sensible wool suit is all

that keeps her upright. The saleslady
unfurls her measuring tape, refigures numbers

and disappears. Dizzy with secret gluttony,
the girl thinks of all the men who will try
to capture her breasts beneath their large palms

or perhaps skip a breath while trying to swallow
them whole. She hopes her blowsy pink nipples

will spray them with the heavy scent of sweet
blue milk. And all of this is to come, she thinks,
admiring the swelling high above the fabric

never designed to contain such lushness.
Her skin is glazed beneath discreet

fluorescent lighting. The girl ignores her mother;
that worn body has been tightened and lifted
for so long that it's turned hollow inside.

She looks instead at the flaring of handfuls,
armfuls of flesh. She's still growing.

The poems in Embellishments are simply courageous. In this collection Virginia Chase Sutton is not afraid to be honest yet she does so with the elegance of "emroidered gold chrysanthemums." Indeed, Sutton demonstrates that she is in full control of her craft. The reader will be delighted by the power of poetry found here and the world should be grateful that these poems have finally arrived.

- Rick Noguchi

In these tightly woven poems, Virginia Sutton has seined memory and caught intense images of pain and desire. Read these poems and experience how vivid, how extraordinary, the most ordinary day can be---in the hands of this poet.

- Minnie Bruce Pratt

books..events..reviews..about..home