Burning My Birth Certificate   (January 2018)


By Pamela Sutton

ISBN: 978-0-912592-81-7

Winner of the 2016 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, selected by Andrew Hudgins.

Available January 2018 

[Amazon] [Ashland Bookstore]

PREVIEW

Praise for Burning My Birth Certificate:

In “Night Mowing,” Sutton says, “I smell/like sweat and blood and metal,” and so do her piercing poems.  All those disparate aspects of herself grieve for American wrongs and the wrongs of history, as well as the more intimate depredations life itself inflicts on those we love and on our own bodies.  Burning My Birth Certificate is a passionate investigation of the responsibilities of anguish and the consolations of the inconsolable. 

 Andrew Hudgins, 2016 final judge


 

“…the crystalline morning we thought was ours, /and how it burst…” -- loss and betrayals personal, public, planetary coalesce in the timely, passionate vision of Pamela Sutton, who, like the Slow Lauris she describes has “eyes huge/from eons of accommodating darkness.“ Resonant as “a scalloped moon,/like a shovel’s edge,/clanging against the icy sky,” fiery and revealing as “the blow torch of morning lighting each fissure of rock”—hers is language at its most acute: outraged, fierce and incandescent.

– Eleanor Wilner  


About the Author

Pamela Sutton

Pamela Sutton's first book of poetry, "Pocket Gospel," was published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2012.  Her poetry was chosen by Robert Pinsky to appear in Scribner's 25th Anniversary issue of BAP, "The Best of the Best American Poetry," 2013.   Her poetry was chosen by Robert Wagoner to appear in Scribner's BAP, 2009; and chosen by Rita Dove for Scribner's BAP, 2000.   The first chapter of her novel, "Tamer of Horses," won first place and was published by Glimmer Train Press, 2010.  Her poetry has been published widely in "The American Poetry Review;" "Prairie Schooner;" "Colorado Review;" "Threepenny Review;" and many other Literary magazines.   She taught Critical and Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania from 1993 through 2008.   She holds an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University and an MFA from Boston University where she was awarded the George Starbuck Fellowship.  She has one terrific daughter, Emily. 

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