To the Man in the Red Suit
Christina Fulton
May 5, 2020
“A fine collection that gives grief the tonic sting of saltwater.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2020
Christina Fulton
May 5, 2020
“A fine collection that gives grief the tonic sting of saltwater.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2020
Christina Fulton
May 5, 2020
“A fine collection that gives grief the tonic sting of saltwater.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2020
Additional Information:
Format: 5.5 x 8.5 (Paperback)
Release Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 9781578690275
LCCN: 2019919107
e-Book ISBN: 978-1-57869-028-2 Click Here to Purchase eBook
Booksellers and Libraries: Order Here.
EXCERPT
Midnight Dalliances in Time and Space at Mile Marker 54
Finger tips in stardust
and his tributaries
in my flesh.
It’s all relative
in the sea’s white capped
lashes.
The little dipper
is my big spoon.
SYNOPSIS
Dark, humorous, abrasive, bereft, and whimsical: these are poems of the grief process within a dysfunctional and fractured family and world. In her debut full-length collection, Fulton writes about her father’s suicide and its aftermath; about strained familial relationships and dealing with regret and grief. She acknowledges mental health concerns, internal and global suffering, and the hope that can only be obtained through turning trauma into art. This is a masterful collection of poetry that brings light back into the cracks left by depression and loss.
CRITICS’ REVIEWS
A collection of poems explores the aftermath of a father’s suicide.
This volume was a finalist for the Anne Sexton Poetry Prize and the Lauria/Frasca Prize for Poetry, and several pieces have been previously published in literary magazines. As a note from Fulton explains, her father committed suicide in 2011, followed a day later by the catastrophic tsunami in Japan. Images of watery disruption and disaster—seawater, tears, amniotic fluid— weave throughout the book. The opening poem, “The Transcontinental Flight of My Father’s Ghost,” explicitly links personal and geological upheavals: “The nuclear mucus / of a shared pain / was the rift / between our two faults.” This linkage is underscored by words that chime or repeat sounds: nuclear mucus; aftermath/afterbirth; disenchanted/disinfected. A flood-stranded man “looked like you. / Soaking in the salty bits / of weightless doubt.” Similarly, double meanings and mysterious correspondences haunt many poems. In “Magazine Shreds,” for example, the father’s boating magazine and his death have spooky resonance with his descent into darkness, emphasized by lines that stair-step down the page (“Dive, / Dive, / Dive”), while the final line, “in your wake,” again combines the watery and the funereal. Alongside the poet’s grief is her sardonic anger, as in “Snippets,” in which the speaker’s mother phones for “my husband’s / autopsy report.” Perhaps she’s in the kitchen, one inhabited by betrayal: “Bad faith lives in an ice cube tray.” The report’s clinical tone and the kitchen’s nurturance find confluence in the poet’s “egg shell nipples” over her “left ventricle,” hinting at what’s cracked open. In another egg reference, the father’s abandonment of his family “was over easy”—the familiar phrase made scathingly bitter by its context. Yet, as Fulton makes powerfully clear throughout this book, her pain is as true as her anger.
A fine collection that gives grief the tonic sting of saltwater.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
PRAISE
"To the Man in the Red Suit is a remarkable first book. Christina Fulton, fully formed as a craftsperson and unique in her delivery, offers us the kind of searing fare we might want to empathize with or even turn from, but we can't. We must go further. The poems round about us like necklaces of deep thought and emotion, each segment of the chain bursting with colors of dark and light. Fulton's style links object after object with single modifiers in short phrases throughout the poems, each bit its own element of slightly changing viewpoint upon which to reflect her state, and by showing those objects, the subjective becomes real, becomes our state. This book is evidence of a bright and hopefully long career already well underway."
—Al Rocheleau, Florida State Poets Association President and author of On Writing Poetry and Falling River: Collected Poems 1976-2016
_______________________
“Fulton’s collection is a gift. So many of these poems get into your bones and sinews and stay there. She’s vulnerable and the writing is, at times, devastating while still being simply beautiful.”
—Gloria Panzera, author of With All My Love, I Wait
_______________________
“Christina Fulton’s To the Man in the Red Suit is rough and tender in equal measure. Images—a desk, a brain, and more—press together and grind down with the force of memory to show us the speaker’s father, wearing both his funeral suit and complications. And to memory as a whole, Fulton says it best: ‘please forward / the part of me / you saved.’”
—Nicole Oquendo, author of Space Baby: Episodes I-III
_______________________
“The poems in Christina Fulton’s exquisite debut collection To the Man in the Red Suit are ruminations on a life of the ironic, the beautiful, the poignant, and the bittersweet. Prominent among the memories that are fuel for the fire of these poems are the poet’s childhood in New Jersey and the suicide of her workaholic father. My favorite, an ode called “To My Father’s Confused and Empty Desk,” ends with the perfectly adroit enjambment of lines: ‘He only came back / to count your rings, / and kiss the scissors / good night.’ Sometimes these pretty poems soothe, sometimes they sting, sometimes they fill your mouth with precious stones that you cannot chew but break your teeth on trying. The poet uses no clichés but masterfully creates them: ‘I saw your lies bend’; ‘That imperfect field / where Jesus / taught the lilies to blush’; ‘You can jiggle / but can you bend?’ Long after you read this book, you will be quoting from it.”
—Preston L. Allen, author of Every Boy Should Have a Man and Jesus Boy
_______________________
“Welcome to the dark and attractive world of To The Man in the Red Suit, Christina Fulton’s first book of poetry, which focuses on her father and his suicide. Fulton’s diction displays a wide vocabulary with inventive figurative leaps, and her playful syntax furthers the fresh reading experience. Long poems with short lines add to the disjointed tone of the speaker. She uses space inventively: poetry in the form of a form with spaces for patient signatures, crossed out words, PSA interruptions, sound effects, and odd symbols and signs are all part of the fun and attractiveness of this collection. The dark part is the subject matter and that tone, yet these are the elements that give the work its structure. Fulton introduces each section of her book with a prose piece about her father and family, and throughout To The Man in the Red Suit, we are never too far from his death; we are constantly enwrapped in the poet’s voice making connections and picking up the pieces.”
—Dr. Jeff Morgan, author of American Comic Poetry: History, Techniques and Modern Masters
MEET CHRISTINA
Christina Fulton received her Bachelor’s in English with a minor in Mass Media Communications/Journalism from Lynn University in 2008, and her MFA in Fiction from Florida Atlantic University in 2011. She currently teaches at Miami Dade College North. She has a supportive mother, a caring husband, and two crazy dogs. To the Man in the Red Suit is her first published poetry collection.
Read an interview with the poet here.