To the Man in the Red Suit Earns a Kirkus Star!

We are thrilled to see this debut book of poetry, the inaugural in our Rootstock Poetry Series, garnering such favorable reviews, the latest this starred Kirkus review:

A fine collection that gives grief the tonic sting of saltwater.

To the Man in the Red Suit by Christina Fulton | Release Date: May 5, 2020

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)

A starred review is a highly coveted designation for a book of outstanding quality, and we thank and congratulate all those who worked on this book: the poet Christina Fulton (of course); poetry editor Samantha Kolber; and book designer Kelly Collar of Mad River Creative. All the elements to make this book a star have come together beautifully: the words, the flow, and the artwork. We hope you’ll consider adding this book to your poetry collection.