Close Escapes

Navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor, Close Escapes searches for an answer to our earthly existence by way of visions only the blind can see.

＂Never ’in’ time,＂ Stephen Kuusisto’s third poetry collection, Close Escapes, moves through a river of memory. In one poem, Kuusisto is ＂the blind kid again,＂ pressing his finger to a cornered spider. In another, he walks down a harbor in Helsinki, ＂still twenty-three among the Baltic gulls.＂ Adrift in time and place-Tallinn, New York, a Velamo monastery--our anchor is the poet, navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor. As Kuusisto moves forward through meditations on beauty, ＂dark joy,＂ loss, aging, and the afterlife, he also reaches back, talking to writers, musicians, and thinkers of the past--Orwell, Marvin Bell, Salvatore Quasimodo. In one scene, Kuusisto ponders death, asking Bach to ＂Tell [him] of the galant flourishes / As we leave this life.＂ Readers, alongside Kuusisto, are left reaching for that ＂frail wisdom,＂ for an answer to the question of our earthly existence. We find tenderness in our human connections, both lasting and fleeting, sometimes gone. We drift onward, learning to find ＂music in human silence.＂

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light, Letters to Borges, Old Horse, What Is to Be Done? and, most recently, Someone Falls Overboard: Talking Through Poemswith Ralph James Savarese. His memoir Planet of the Blindwas a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and has since been followed by Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindnessand Listening and Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey. A Guggenheim fellow and Fulbright Scholar, Kuusisto has appeared on numerous television and radio programs including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and Animal Planet. His daily blog, Planet of the Blind, is read globally by people interested in disability and contemporary culture. Kuusisto directs The Burton Blatt Institute’s interdisciplinary programs in disability at Syracuse University, where he holds a University Professorship.