The Reindeer Camps

collaborations with composer Marya Hart—Bushed: A Poetical, Political, Partly Musical Tragicomedy in Two Acts and Pine Creek Parish: A Verse Play with Music—have won standing ovations. Barton Sutter lives in Duluth, on a hillside overlooking Lake Superior, with his wife, Dorothea Diver.

He has written for public radio, and he often performs as one half of The Sutter Brothers, a poetry-and-music duo.

first Poet Laureate of Duluth.

Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant (Sweden), a Loft-McKnight Award, and the Bassine Citation from the Academy of American Poets

Minnesota Book Award for poetr

Thanks to Mary Pulford, whose very Northern remark in a parking lot inspired “February Thaw.” And to Irina Alexanderovna Miloserdova Bogge for her magnificent recitation of a poem by Pushkin one memorable afternoon in a Duluth bookstore

Hunger” is based on information in John Clare: A Biography by Jonathan Bate.

This poem owes everything to The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky, including a few lines I simply lifted from Vitebsky’s often poetic prose. The poem is intended as a tribute to his enchanting book and to the people and animals he studied.

Red Dragonfly Press in April of 2008. T

All of the poems in Section III are included in Bushed: A Poetical, Political, Partly Musical Tragicomedy in Two Acts, Book and Lyrics by Barton Sutter, Original Music and Arrangements by Marya Hart, originally produced and directed by Brian Matuszak, Rubber Chicken Theater, Duluth, Minnesota, in October, 2008.