Susan Kinsolving

Susan Kinsolving Poems

Susan Kinsolving Biography

Born in Elmhurst, Illinois, poet Susan Kinsolving earned a BA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. Kinsolving’s poetry uses dark humor, rhyme, and received form to explore loss, family, ephemera, and the natural world. In the New York Times, poet Carol Muske-Dukes praised its “powerful and practiced repertory of formal gestures, including a startling backhand of wit and irony,” observing that “[i]t is compassion, tenderness for all the beauty and dross of the world, that turns her eye away from her own reflection and toward the enumeration of odd blessings.” Kinsolving’s collections of poetry include The White Eyelash (2003) and Dailies & Rushes (1999), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her librettos have been performed by the Baroque Choral Guild and the Glimmerglass Opera. Kinsolving has won the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award as well as several international fellowships. She has taught at the Bennington Writing Seminars, the University of Connecticut, and the California Institute of the Arts. She lives in Bridgewater, Connecticut.)

The Best Poem Of Susan Kinsolving

Trust

Trust that there is a tiger, muscular
Tasmanian, and sly, which has never been
seen and never will be seen by any human
eye. Trust that thirty thousand sword-
fish will never near a ship, that far
from cameras or cars elephant herds live
long elephant lives. Believe that bees
by the billions find unidentified flowers
on unmapped marshes and mountains. Safe
in caves of contentment, bears sleep.
Through vast canyons, horses run while slowly
snakes stretch beyond their skins in the sun.
I must trust all this to be true, though
the few birds at my feeder watch the window
with small flutters of fear, so like my own.

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