Joyce Sutphen reads from her new collection of poems "The Green House"

In The Green House, we find clouds, a variety of birds (each a messenger from some other world), and the inspiring landscape, skyscape, seascape, creaturescape of Ireland, where poems appear magically out of thin bri
ght air, before breakfast or one morning on the beach between Liscannor and Lahinch. 
Joyce Sutphen always pays close attention in her poems.  She sees how “the cows change shape as they move,” how the morning clouds in Dingle “bellied down over the mountains and broke into grey, white, and blue.”
In The Green House, Joyce Sutphen’s close attention meets her own continuing song—an Irish “tune without the words.” Here are the words…the words that perfectly match that yearning old tune...that old tune we already know in our bones.

Tim Nolan
Author of The Field

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Minnesota. She earned a PhD in Renaissance drama from the University of Minnesota, and has taught British literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. 
Her first collection of poems, Straight Out of View (1995), won the Barnard Women’s Poets Prize. Subsequent collections include Coming Back to the Body (2000), a Minnesota Book Award finalist, Naming the Stars (2004), winner of the Minnesota Book Award, and First Words (2010).She has received a McKnight Artist Fellowship and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and was named Minnesota's Poet Laureate in 2011.