Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Close Escapes

Close Escapes

Kuusisto, Stephen

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $19.00

ISBN10: 1556596898
ISBN13: 9781556596896
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Published: Apr 22 2025
Pages: 136
Weight: 0.43
Height: 0.33 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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.

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