Hutton '95 explores childhood, adolescence, and motherhood in poetry

 

The author: Hutton’s poetry has appeared in the Yale Review, Harvard Review, Antioch Review, and Interim. “Rose Gold and Poppies,” one of the poems in this, her first collection of poetry, won the Wabash Prize from the Sycamore Review. Hutton teaches at the University of Michigan.

 

The book: This collection explores the “various identities of childhood, adolescence, and motherhood,” says Hutton. The poet Chase Twichell has called the poems “emotionally and intellectually spontaneous.” They feel “as if we were present at their coming-into-being, a genuine writer-reader intimacy that’s hard to achieve at any stage, let alone in a first book. The poems about childhood and adolescence are among the most powerful I’ve ever read.”

 

From the book: Flax

“Then I decided to unpack the linens.

A hundred at least. Spent a while idly freeing

The pieces of buttercup, eggshell and bone;

 

To my interruptions, they gave themselves up

Pretty graciously, although still keeping their creases

Softly true, like spines.”

 

Review: She’d Waited Millennia “measures both interior and exterior moments, the moments that create change and growth, the moments that we suffer through, and the long moments through which we can only wait. This poet considers life in its various ages and moments dispassionately, almost surgically, and she isn’t afraid to talk about identity in terms of lies and the decisions we make about what we choose to be true,” wrote Debrah Lechner for Hayden’s Ferry Review.