Ms. Susan Kinsolving, instructor in English and poet-in-residence, is slated to have her Peripheral Vision, a collection with about 45 of her most recent poems, published on May 28. As a preview for this publication, the Arts & Leisure Editors have decided to feature a testimonial and a poem from the book in order to provide an advanced glimpse of Ms. Kinsolving’s collection.
It will be her first project published by Red Hen Press. Some of her previous works include Dailies and Rushes (1999) and The White Eyelash (2003), both of which received widespread critical acclaim, with the latter chosen as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Peripheral Vision explores a variety of settings and points of view. Kinsolving brings readers to a military hospital, an elementary school, and a lunatic asylum. Her compilation has already received advanced praise from multiple renowned poets, as demonstrated below.

“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