Close Escapes

<p><strong>Navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor <em>Close Escapes </em>searches for an answer to our earthly existence by way of visions only the blind can see. </strong></p>
<p>Never 'in' time Stephen Kuusisto's third poetry collection <em>Close Escapes</em> 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.”</p>