Joyce Sutphen je americká básnířka, jejíž dílo se často zaměřuje na zkoumání každodenního života a jeho skrytých hloubek. Její verše jsou známé svou přístupností a schopností nacházet poezii v obyčejných okamžicích. Sutphen se věnuje detailům, které často přehlížíme, a dává jim novou perspektivu. Její vliv jako básnířky a pedagožky je značný.
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 swiftly moving life. In the same carefully crafted language as she uses to describe an oat binder, Sutphen surveys marriage and love.
"This Long Winter contains poems that are meditations on life in the rural world: reflections on hard work, aging, 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 world. Noticing its details, the snowflakes, clementines, the lilies, the cardinal's call, is the key for this momentary stay against time that comes at us in a rush. The many mirror images in these poems point to the complexity and hard, loving work of really living in the world. And now, in the deep mid-winter, deep in the enforced slowdown of this pandemic, we need these poems to help us know what to do with the past and how to live and how to love"--