Close Escapes

By Stephen Kuusisto

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.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2025
• ISBN: 9781619323001

Stephen Kuusisto

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; 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. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a professorship in the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.

Book preview

Cover: Close Escapes by Stephen Kuusisto

Close Escapes

STEPHEN KUUSISTO

Logo: Copper Canyon Press

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Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

For Jim Crenner

Contents

Title Page

Note to the Reader

I was alone in a room with a radio

THE COLLAPSE OF A WISH

How does it begin

A repeated fury has me by the toe

The day was like a forest of stone with stringent ballads

Topographers of the eighteenth century

My louche

Dear Id: I have just now stepped off the train

I bought an umbrella from a street vendor

I spent a long winter reading Edith Södergran

There was this Russian place in Helsinki

I wonder whether I can stick to one thought

I went to the river to find my old