Particles of a Stranger Light

Author: Anthony Sutton

Publisher: Veliz Books (2023)

A memoir. A horror movie. A descent into hell. Anthony Sutton's debut poetry collection Particles of a Stranger Light employs a wide array of approaches and forms to obsessively dissect issues of memory, identity, culture, and history. Circling around the trauma of a single night, these poems reach into the void to reclaim what has been lost.

“Anthony Sutton’s debut book is haunted by the old, existential question no one has yet been able to answer satisfactorily: Who or what am I? Rimbaud proclaimed, Je est un autre or I is another. Sutton updates Rimbaud with wry postmodern panache. In one poem, his I is a ‘Mixed White/Filipino Poet’ who ‘Interrogates the Basic Notion of ‘Passing’ and then Accepts Being Read as a Latinx Woman.’ In others, he is the zombie who has lost his identity after being ‘roofied.’ He is also the person who knows ‘if I had a god to pray to // it would be the light fixture / in the jail cell I spent most / of a day in.’ All I know is that I want to keep reading and rereading these lovely, strange, wise, and wise-cracking selves that Sutton invents for himself in Particles of a Stranger Light. This virtuoso book passes like a Category 5 hurricane through our consciousness and, if you let it, will rearrange who you are.”

–Donald Platt