Poetry. Joyce Sutphen grew up on a working dairy farm, and her poems recover this lost world, with all its beauty and order. This collection traces a shift in the rural landscape from horses to tractors, from haystacks to hay bales—and watches as time ages and changes the people who make up the story. FIRST WORDS is both elegy and celebration-—ultimately its center is family, then and now.

Author City: CHASKA, MN USA

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm near St. Joseph, Minnesota, and currently lives in Chaska, Minnesota. She has degrees from the University of Minnesota, including a Ph. D. in Renaissance Drama. Her first book, STRAIGHT OUT OF VIEW, won the Barnard New Women's Poets Prize (Beacon Press, 1995, republished by Holy Cow! Press in 2001). COMING BACK TO THE BODY (Holy Cow! Press, 2000) was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and NAMING THE STARS (Holy Cow! Press 2004), won a Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. In 2005, Red Dragonfly Press published Fourteen Sonnets in a letterpress edition, and in 2006 she co-edited To Sing Along the Way, an award-winning anthology of Minnesota Women Poets from the Territorial Days to the Present (New Rivers Press). Her most recent book is FIRST WORDS (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Minnesota Monthly, North Dakota Review, and many other journals, and she has been a guest on A Prairie Home Companion, hosted by Garrison Keillor.