Sinkhole

After her father took his own life in 2009 at age 77, Patterson delved into her family's legacy of suicide-the result is a stirring look at how history, environment, and cultural pressures all played a role . . . Patterson's lyrical and discerning treatment of a global 'psychological crisis' will keep readers transfixed. -Publishers Weekly Sinkhole is a literary triumph. Juliet Patterson brings us to a brave, smart, and compassionate understanding of suicide. Anyone who has lost someone to suicide knows the haunting that follows. You are buried beneath an avalanche of questions that can never be answered. But in Patterson's adept hands, we not only enter 'the natural history of suicide,' offering insights to an erosional state of mind, we are taken into societal patterns that foster an atmosphere where suicide becomes the end point of isolation and despair. The somber connections Patterson makes between her father's death by suicide and the family legacy that precedes his death, tied to a history of coal mining, exposes the fact that our health and the health of the planet cannot be separated. The violence we inflict on ourselves is a mirror of the violence we inflict on land. Juliet Patterson is a soaring writer who has chosen to not look away. We are the beneficiaries of her gaze. There is poetry in this elegiac book, with an uncommon beauty and stillness radiating between each sentence. Sinkhole resurrects our dead from the sorrow and silences surrounding suicide and gives voice to the whys of their voiceless acts. -Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion In confronting her family's dark legacy of suicide, Juliet Patterson does far more than plumb the depths of human despair. Sinkhole is a master class in the way truth can pry open the deepest cellar, how language can calm a raw, ragged soul. To read this unflinching look at darkness is to find a way toward the light. After so much darkness, so much light! -Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations Praise for Juliet Patterson Juliet Patterson's poems are entirely themselves; they use time and the eye and tongue-all the body, as thought and insight, inside and outside history. -Jean Valentine Patterson's work is rich with compression, power, and a precision I'd like to steal for myself. -Joni Tevis, Orion Spare, pastoral, intimate, and probing, [Patterson's] musically exacting poems offer arresting insights. . . . They question, invent, refer, divert, take flying risks. They are fluid, considered, dignified. They celebrate the human eye, mind, and tongue. -Olga Broumas Thrilling . . . [Patterson's] poetic realm has been that of the precise image . . . placed in short and striking lines. Through these images, she has revealed the path of the mind, often playfully. -DIAGRAM [Patterson's] poems are driven by a voice that I think would define the world clearly and unequivocally if it were possible. Instead, the poet is forced (like most of us) to offer up images, the correspondences that connect them, and the humanity behind what life leaves for us. . . . Creating a world where there are no easy answers, Patterson asks for active reading. -Painted Bride Quarterly In Patterson's vision, nature rarely gives without taking some small token in return. . . . She laments the looming destruction of nature even as that destruction portends the creation of something new. -Publishers Weekly Direct and tough, lush and erect . . . [Patterson] will bring you tears, bend your branch, twist your mind. -Twin Cities Daily Planet There is a kind of communion . . . between what is said and what is not said, that reminds the reader of walking through the very December fields that Patterson describes, noting the dry, brittle landscape and yet-and also-the spry and determined life that persists within it. . . . [Patterson's] quiet poems . . . are more like finely chiseled ice sculptures than gleaming, luxurious gems. But the truth they express is no less radiant-in fact, it may be even more so, borne as it is out of a season of less rather than plenty. -Shannon Gibney Patterson's ear is at once impeccable and exciting. . . . We understand the poet's vision and language as a form of querying, a kind of existential question conditioned by existence's constant opposite, nonexistence. -Ryo Yamaguchi