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 Kuusistos 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 placeTallinn, New York, a Velamo monasteryour 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 pastOrwell, 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.