Joyce Sutphen Seeing, Up Close Again Like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, I swooned to see again the immense detail of the ordinary world: the rippling surface of a fingernail, exactly the color of a horn erupting through the swirled-hair head of a calf, the flayed landscape of skin where catgut, pressing into the finger's tip, made a ragged canyon, the beaten sheen of a silver ring around the pillared finger, dark-tarnished runes in its patterned crevices. Nothing was too tiny for my hungry eye, nothing too finely etched. I had grown weary of smooth honed perfection, perceived from a distance. Now, even the smallest stroke of ink on paper was deep enough to fold me in. Joyce Sutphen lives in Chaska, Minnesota and teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review and other journals, and her first book, Straight Out of View (Beacon Press, 1995) won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Her second book, Coming Back to the Body, was published by Holy Cow! Press in 2000, and Holy Cow! Press recently reprinted Straight Out of View (2001).