Peripheral Vision

POETRY BY

Susan Kinsolving

Peripheral Vision goes behind the scenes in a military hospital, an elementary school, and a disturbed family. Susan Kinsolving’s poems were described in the New Yorker as “grand and almost terrifying.” In this new collection, she proves herself again. Exploring the world from many points of view, Kinsolving takes her readers to England, Hollywood, Wyoming, France, and Chile. In idiosyncratic homages, she invokes Neruda, Bishop, Clare, Frost, and Dickinson, along with Helen Keller and Odilon Redon. While referencing fact or history, she attacks with “a startling backhand of wit and irony,” as noted once in the New York Times Book Review. She writes poignantly to a daughter in Hollywood and acerbically to an ex-husband. Her family’s most disastrous Thanksgiving is described in a funny piece, “Fill the Cavity with Crumbs.” In “The Case of the Carrot,” she reports on an absurd legal action in family court. All Kinsolving’s poems demonstrate a keen love of language, its dimensions of meaning and musicality of sound. Each poem is a pleasure.

REVIEWS

Susan Kinsolving’s poems gratify the senses, and if that were all they did, it would be much more than enough for even the most difficult-to-appease reader of poetry. They do something more, though: as the title of this beautiful volume suggests, they bring us in tantalizing proximity to the radiant mysteries that prowl just beyond the sphere of the senses. They are triumphs of perception and miracles of insight. —Vijay Seshadri

Susan Kinsolving practices an enchanted speech that awakens us to the bright glare of surviving time, of passionate seeing, especially the natural world, and as mother, wife, and daughter, of an art that honors our fragile yet sturdy relationships. These poems, more than an enhanced book of hours or remembrance of things past, are invocations soaked in the fluencies of sound and enriched by a palpable intellect that gifts readers so much charm, sublimity, and humor. —Major Jackson

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The White Eyelash

Praise for the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Poetry,
Dailies & Rushes:

“Grand and almost terrifying.” –The New Yorker

“[A] brilliant debut. A powerful and practiced repertory of formal gestures including a startling backhand of wit and irony. Susan Kinsolving takes what is before our eyes and disappearing . . . and makes it last.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“Susan Kinsolving dazzles with Dalies & Rushes.” –Vanity Fair

“Susan Kinsolving beautifully evokes the many moods of [the] quiet hour, touching on both the human landscape and the natural one. With astonishing insight, [she] looks into the heard of hushes.” –The Wall Street Journal

Dailies Rushes Susan Kinsolving

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Dailies & Rushes

“The passion, playfulness, and regret in these wonderful poems will make many women think this book was written just for them.” –Susan Cheever

“Susan Kinsolving’s poems skate with a dark elegance on the thin ice between the upper air and a deepening sorrow, between the day’s figures and memory’s pattern. But she’s headed towards love: the distant shore, the beckoning warmth; and by the end of Dailies & Rushes she has gotten herself–and, to our delight and gratitude, brought us as well–triumphantly there.”
–J. D. McClatchy

“What rings with authenticity in Susan Kinsolving’s poems is a lovely severity. . . . Sorrow and courage and pleasure register themselves in lucid distillations, like the purities of winter air.”
–Anthony Hecht

““Things just are,” Susan Kinsolving writes, in a matter-of-fact tone that belies a fiery intensity. In her poetry, commonplace things are imbued with a magical aura. Her wry wit clarifies as it deepens a tragic vision.”
–Grace Schulman

“In her first major collection Susan Kinsolving shows herself to be a poet of ravenous amplitudes, of wit schooled by feeling, of observations had owed by memory, and of landscape rising to what she calls “an oblique sublimity” which is also the hallmark of her art.” –Edward Hirsch

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Among Flowers

In this captivating mixed bouquet of art and letters, two contemporary talents take a fresh look at familiar flora– and transport lovers of poetry, painting, and flowers to a garden of delights and surprises.

Among her pointed observations in verse, poet Susan Kinsolving considers the tulip as history (“Tulipomania”), the eyesight of a celebrated gardener (“Gertrude Jekyll’s Myopia”), and the buoyant beauty of winter bloom (“Forcing Amaryllis”). Painter Susan Colgan’s vivid still lifes in oil include a humminbgird’s-eye view of a morning glory, a sun-dappled tabletop with a centerpiece de résistance of dazzling daylilies, and a deep-blue conglomerate of hydrangeas and patterned pottery.

AMONG FLOWERS combines 40 fresh, original poems and painting of charm and character that complement and illuminate each other. The authors share not only first names, but a special sensibility when it comes to flowers. And a gift for collaboration that makes this collection a pure pleasure.

Anthologies

Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, Knopf

A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, Washburn University Press

Crossing State Lines, An American Renga, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Sugar In My Bowl, by HarperCollins

The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology, by Houghton & Draper, Persea Books

The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal..,Picador

Words & Rules, by Steven Pinker, Basic Books (USA), Orion (UK)

In Lieu of Flowers, by Nancy Cobb, Pantheon

To Woo and To Wed: An Anthology, Simon & Schuster

Tulips, by Scott D. Appell, Freidman/Fairfax

From The Hudson To The World: Voices Of The River Anthology, HRS Foundation

Contemporary New England Poetry: A Sampler, Texas Review Press

All Nations Poetry Anthology, Triton College, Illinois

Heartbeat of New England, An Anthology of Contemporary Nature Poetry, Tiger Moon Press

For A Living, The Poetry of Work, University of Illinois

Articulations: Poetry About Illness and the Body, University of Iowa Press

Snakes: An Anthology of Serpent Tales, Evans & Co.

Sunken Garden Poetry, Wesleyan University Press