Sinkhole

Juliet Patterson is the author of Sinkhole, as well as two collections of poems, Threnody and The Truant Lover, a finalist for the Lambda Award. Her poems and essays have appeared widely. She has received fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minneapolis-based Institute for Community Cultural Development. Her other awards include the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in nonfiction and the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. She lives in Minneapolis.

Praise for Sinkhole“Mixing autobiography, academic psychology, and an ecological history of Kansas, Patterson, a poet, examines the suicides in her family, beginning with her father’s.”—The New Yorker“A soulful odyssey . . . [Patterson’s] bewilderment and edge-of-the-sinkhole grief is palpable . . . Though the memoir doesn’t solve the riddle of suicide or offer a neat narrative arc, it does show the value of remembering and the importance of paying attention to, for example, a ‘rack of suits and ties,’ . . . or a Lite Brite message left glowing in the dark after her father left for a business trip that said: ‘Be good. I love you. See you soon.’”—Minneapolis Star Tribune“Patterson marvels at the pervasiveness of some of her family members’, on both her paternal and maternal sides, dying by suicide . . . Tying together environmental, political, and historical facts in her family tree, the author imagines what it means to take one’s life and shares what it’s like to be the one left behind. As fascinating as it is upsetting, Patterson has intersected the past and future, imagining the silent crisis happening among the men in her family, as well as the persistent fear of her own potential demise through self-harm, all while considering genetics, societal pressures, and prescribed antidepressants. The end result is an elegantly tragic work of research, history, and creative nonfiction that seeks answers, closure, and ultimate peace.”—Library Journal, starred review“A spare, sensitive evocation of Patterson’s experience of grief, paired with an insightful work of family and regional history . . . The poet’s sensibility is evident in these pages, as she excavates her own raw emotions alongside passages of clear-eyed journalism and creative nonfiction. Sinkhole is a painfully honest and sobering work that may provide insight and comfort to those facing a similar tragedy.’”—Shelf Awareness“After her father took his own life in 2009 at age 77, Patterson delved into her family’s legacy of suicide—the result is a stirring look at how history, environment, and cultural pressures all played a role . . . Patterson’s lyrical and discerning treatment of a global ‘psychological crisis’ will keep readers transfixed.”—Publishers Weekly“A pensive memoir about mental illness, suicide, and the quest to uncover often hidden family secrets . . . Apart from the personal, [Patterson] weaves in results from her research in thanatology and suicide, including the provocative thought from psychologist Edwin Shneidman that ‘the person who commits suicide puts his psychological skeleton in the survivor’s emotional closet.’ A searching, often elegant meditation on loneliness, pain, and redemption.”—Kirkus Reviews"Along with the environmental history braided throughout, Sinkhole offers a master class in how extensive research can add depth and breadth to personal writing."—The Washington Independent Review of Books“Patterson’s poetic sensibility informs her prose as she weaves together ideas about family and research about land in a lyrical way.”—Book Pages “Sinkhole is a literary triumph.Juliet Patterson brings us to a brave, smart, and compassionate understandingof suicide. Anyone who has lost someone to suicide knows the haunting thatfollows. You are buried beneath an avalanche of questions that can never beanswered. But in Patterson’s adept hands, we not only enter ‘thenatural history of suicide,’ offering insights to an erosional state of mind,we are taken into societal patterns that foster an atmosphere where suicidebecomes the end point of isolation and despair. The somber connectionsPatterson makes between her father’s death by suicide and the family legacythat precedes his death, tied to a history of coal mining, exposes the factthat our health and the health of the planet cannot be separated. Theviolence we inflict on ourselves is a mirror of the violence we inflict onland. Juliet Patterson is a soaring writer who has chosen to not lookaway. We are the beneficiaries of her gaze. There is poetry in thiselegiac book, with an uncommon beauty and stillness radiating between eachsentence. Sinkhole resurrects our dead from thesorrow and silences surrounding suicide and gives voice to the whys oftheir voiceless acts.”—Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion“In confronting her family’s dark legacy ofsuicide, Juliet Patterson does far more than plumb the depths of humandespair. Sinkhole is a master class in the way truth can pryopen the deepest cellar, how language can calm a raw, ragged soul. To read thisunflinching look at darkness is to find a way toward the light. After so muchdarkness, so much light!”—Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations“Juliet Patterson writes with a poet’s precision and a poet’s heart too about that most devastating moment, the loss of a parent. Devastating twice over by the terms and manner in which he died. Survivors are left to ask ‘Why?’ and normally one says there is no answer to this question. But Patterson keeps asking. In this text that has the feel of a police procedural but the emotional weight of a desperation to know, Patterson delves into familial and social history and brings us, the readers, along on a perilous journey. By the end we realize we each too might be—physically, socially, psychologically, spiritually, medically, environmentally—in the midst of life but on the lip of death. As a parent, a wife, a poet, a daughter, a human, Juliet Patterson makes the most courageous foray yet into answering that last unanswerable question: ‘Why?’”—Kazim Ali, author of Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water