<DIV><p>"[Kuusisto] is a powerful writer with a musical ear for language and a gift for emotional candor."?<I>The New York Times</I></p><p>"A talented writer judged against any standard."?<I>USA Today</I></p><p>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.</p><p><B>"Alone"</B></p><p><I>Today I understood<BR>While drinking tea<BR>& hearing rain<BR>That the word for birth<BR>& the one for sin<BR>Come from a single root<BR>In Finnish ? that tongue they<BR>Spoke when I was small.</I><BR>Synnty<I>, untranslatable,<BR>Original sin nearly,<BR>But softer,<BR>Like water<BR>Carried a long way<BR>In a jar<BR>In May.</I></p><p><B>Stephen Kuusisto</B> is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He is the author of two collections of poetry and two memoirs, including the best-selling <I>Planet of the Blind</I> (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.</p><BR></DIV>