Letters to Borges by Stephen Kuusisto (Copper Canyon Press, paperback)
Publication Date: February 26, 2013
Publisher Marketing: Poetry. LETTERS TO BORGES is the most recent collection of poetry by best-selling memoirist Stephen Kuusisto. Here, Kuusisto shows how seeing is a negative capability rather than a sense. Blindness becomes a kaleidoscope through which voids and indistinctions are colored with imagination, where "poetry carves a topiary garden out of dust." The great cities of the world—Vienna, London, Buenos Aires—provide locales both imaginary and real from which to address Jorge Luis Borges, a poet who, like Kuusisto himself, lived with blindness. With Borges alongside, Kuusisto finds "Aristotle and algebra" in all the different kinds of rain and considers the possibility of using a dishwasher to celebrate revolutions while bringing back the dead.
