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    Only Bread, Only Light: Poems
    Only Bread, Only Light: Poems
    Only Bread, Only Light: Poems
    Ebook111 pages30 minutes

    Only Bread, Only Light: Poems

    By Stephen Kuusisto

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    About this ebook

    • Author of Planet of the Blind, which has sold over 20,000 copies in cloth and continues to sell vigorously in paperback. • Planet of the Blind has been translated into 12 languages. • Planet of the Blind was an Independent Bookseller Bestseller. • Kuusisto is a disability activist, focusing specifically on blindness mobility. • Has been a guest on Oprah, Dateline, Talk of the Nation, Leeza Gibbons Show and many other print and electronic media. • Great collection of poems. • Teaching at Ohio State
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateDec 11, 2012
    ISBN9781619320499
    Only Bread, Only Light: Poems
    Author

    Stephen Kuusisto

    Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a professorship in the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.

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    • 5/5
      Very short linesEasy to readFastBlindness as recurringPersonal theme

    Book preview

    Only Bread, Only Light - Stephen Kuusisto

    [image: cover]

    Note to the Reader

    Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

    Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.

    When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

    Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

    This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.

    For Connie, Tara, and Ross

    No one perhaps could understand

    who has not been as lost as I was,

    nor as far from others as I felt,

    a heap of coal in the night.

    Then, only bread, only light.

    Pablo Neruda

    translated by Alastair Reid

    Contents

    Title Page

    Note to Reader

    One

    Blind Days in Early Youth

    Learning Braille at Thirty-Nine

    Accomplice

    Guess

    Dante’s Paradiso Read Poorly in Braille

    Serenade

    At the Woods’ Edge

    Diagram

    Guiding Eyes

    Only Bread, Only Light

    Two

    Still

    Drink

    Post-Orphic

    Summer at North Farm

    Helsinki, 1958

    Facing the Trees

    In the Attic

    Praise for the Yiddish Poets

    Lying Still

    Competing Interests within the Family: 1909

    At the Summer House

    First Things

    Waiting

    Three

    Deus Faber

    Tourists

    Sheraton, Chicago, Three a.m.

    In Our Time

    Mandelstam

    Tenth Muse

    The Approximate Hour

    Allegro

    Prism

    Knossos

    The Invention of the Wolf

    Open Window

    King of the Crickets

    Breton-esque

    Rachmaninoff’s Curtains

    Running to the Wood

    Viaticum

    Essay on November

    Mnemosyne

    Revolution by Night

    Descant on Climbing and Descending Stairs

    The Sleep I Didn’t Sleep

    Talking Books

    Elegy for Ted Berrigan

    Ode to Ogden Nash

    Ode to My Sleeping Pills

    The

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