Close Escapes

Stephen Kuusisto

“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.”

ISBN: 9781556596896

Format: Paperback

from “The Collapse of a Wish”

My louche unbuttoned acerbic freewheeling side
Pops up all the time Says what it wants
Says what it wants Said once:
The enemy’s stars are the same as ours—
Said it to a military recruiter and why not?
And said it once to a government agent
Who was photographing a protest against
Ronald Reagan’s suppression of freedom in El Salvador:
You know there are honest jobs
Ones where you can make humble and lasting discoveries
And he of course photographed me

About the Author

Stephen Kuusisto directs The Burton Blatt Institute’s interdisciplinary programs in disability at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship. He is the author of the memoirs Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”) and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light, and Letters to Borges. His newest memoir, Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey was published by Simon & Schuster. A graduate of …

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“Part lyric sequence, part verse notebook, Kuusisto’s gathering of hushed moments, meditative asides and noticings ‘beside the painful river of waking’ echoes earlier writers who used their verse to acknowledge the world’s great unknowns: W.S. Merwin, for example, and the Swedish Nobelist Tomas Tranströmer. . . . His well-traveled life, and his reliance on senses other than sight, suffuse the quiet scenes the new poems construct, outdoors in the snow, ‘beside the abandoned woodstove,’ or indoors under the spell of poetry,”—Stephanie Burt, New York Times

“Acclaimed memoirist and poet Kuusisto, widely recognized for his poetic treatment of disability and blindness, delivers a fourth book of poems characterized by a kind of Nordic Zen . . . Always a pleasure to read, Kuusisto hits a gentle stride here that alternately embraces and releases the world, where ‘Down valley the river / Has melted and frozen again.'”—Diego Báez, Booklist