Readers & Writers: Eavesdropping, Stephen Kuusisto

We continue the theme of People First: literature by and about people with disabilties, with a memoir by poet Stephen Kuusisto. What sighted people know about the world of the blind rarely goes any further than the interesting anecdotal evidence for how other senses work to compensate for the lack of vision. Eavesdropping is Kuusisto's attempt to show how he makes his way through the world listening as opposed to seeing. His version of "active listening" is distinctive and artful. It is an act of world creation as well as an act of world describing. The language of this memoir is vivid, spatial, and memorable.