“[Kuusisto] is a powerful writer with a musical ear for language and a gift for emotional candor.”—The New York Times

“A talented writer judged against any standard.”—USA Today

Best-selling memoirist Stephen Kuusisto uses the themes of travel, place, religion, music, art, and loneliness to explore the relationship between seeing, blindness, and being. In poems addressed to Jorge Luis Borges—another poet who lived with blindness—Kuusisto leverages seeing as negative capability, creating intimacy with deep imagination and uncommon perceptions.

“Alone”

Today I understoodWhile drinking tea& hearing rainThat the word for birth& the one for sinCome from a single rootIn Finnish — that tongue theySpoke when I was small.Synnty, untranslatable,Original sin nearly,But softer,Like waterCarried a long wayIn a jarIn May.

Stephen Kuusisto is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He is the author of two collections of poetry and two memoirs, including the best-selling Planet of the Blind (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). A graduate from and former teacher at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Kuusisto now teaches at Syracuse University in New York State.