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.
PART 1. Emily Dickinson and the Ophthalmoscope -- Write It Down -- The Books to Come -- Letter to Borges from Buenos Aries -- Letter to Borges in His Parlor -- Letter to Borges from Estonia -- Letter to Borges from Galway -- Letter to Borges from London -- Why Poetry Surpasses Your Friends.
PART 2. Early Conditions -- Letter from Vienna, Close of Day -- At the Winter Solstice, Iowa City -- Alone -- If You Ask -- Life in Wartime -- Prose Poem Written at 2 a.m. -- Letter from Saratoga, California -- Approaching Rain -- But Seconds, Minutes of Life -- Book Review -- Normal -- Cafe Solo with an Old Horn -- Apple Mazurka -- By Halves -- Jazz from Cripple City -- The War Production Canzone.
PART 3. Letter to Borges from North Carolina -- Letter to Borges from Tampere, Finland -- Letter to Borges from Madrid -- Letter to Borges from Helsinki -- Letter to Borges from Los Angeles -- Letter to Borges from Graz -- Letter to Borges from Dublin -- Letter to Borges from Houston, Texas -- Letter to Borges from Grazer Schlobberg -- London, Summer Heat Wave -- Letter to Borges from New York City -- Letter to Borges from Pittsburgh -- Letter to Borges from Porvoo, Finland -- Letter to Borges from Turku, Finland -- Why this consistent sadness, Borges? -- Without Stars -- Borges: They Are Knocking the Wind out of Me in Iowa City -- Letter to Borges from Troy, New York.
PART 4. As for the World -- Sundays in Ohio -- The Iowa River -- Lullaby: Happenstance Blues -- Kansas: Deaf Girl Watching the Moon -- Elegy for Ray Charles and His Mother -- Elegy for Lucy Grealy -- Autobiographia Literaria -- For Anyone at All -- Dream in D Minor -- Poems in a Book -- Autumn Comedy -- The Summer Chairs -- They Say -- Hornets in a Woodpile -- "It a Nightingale Could Sing Like You" -- Ode to Victor Frankenstein -- The Lottery Sellers -- Erasing Stars -- History in Empty Air -- Elegy for a Guide Dog -- Letter to Borges from Syracuse -- About the Author.