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My Modest Blindness
In his late twenties, poet Russell Brakefield is diagnosed with keratoconus, a degenerative eye condition that causes blurred vision, light sensitivity, and progressive loss of sight. In the years after, his condition worsens. In My Modest Blindness, he traverses this blurry landscape, drawing connections to art, literature, natural history, and pop culture. Part celebration and part lament, this book uses a sustained conversation with Jorge Luis Borges's famous lecture "On Blindness," as well as a "catalogue of delights of the visual world in the moments just before it leaves," to examine what it means to be a writer and a person slowly losing his ability to see.
102 pages, Paperback
Published October 17, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 5, 2024
Outstanding. Best book of poetry I've read this year.
December 30, 2023
A wonderful book! Explores the diagnosis of a degenerative eye condition -- Karatoconus -- and then the author's experience of that. Interspersed are very vivid visual moments, apparently captured by the poet after he heard he could very well be going blind:
"In the garden a trio of purple heirloom tomatoes, their crowns ringed in new green. A streak of dew hangs on each of their foreheads like sweat. The fine hair of their stems stands tall, pulsing with electricity of water, air, soil. A tag in the dirt tells me the varietal is Indigo Apple, though all year I've been calling them Bruises or Savory Plums or Skyline Just Before Nightfall."
As the young poet tries to come to terms with his condition, he looks, as he must, at the great blind poets that are in much of our literary history, but that never gets stuffy. It is tied to the immediacy of his own diagnosis. He doesn't get sappy about things, but he does look for some hope, and seems to find some. His title comes from Borges's famous essay, and at the end Brakefield quotes the Argentian:
A writer Borges says must believe
whatever happens to him is an instrument
everything has been given for an end
"In the garden a trio of purple heirloom tomatoes, their crowns ringed in new green. A streak of dew hangs on each of their foreheads like sweat. The fine hair of their stems stands tall, pulsing with electricity of water, air, soil. A tag in the dirt tells me the varietal is Indigo Apple, though all year I've been calling them Bruises or Savory Plums or Skyline Just Before Nightfall."
As the young poet tries to come to terms with his condition, he looks, as he must, at the great blind poets that are in much of our literary history, but that never gets stuffy. It is tied to the immediacy of his own diagnosis. He doesn't get sappy about things, but he does look for some hope, and seems to find some. His title comes from Borges's famous essay, and at the end Brakefield quotes the Argentian:
A writer Borges says must believe
whatever happens to him is an instrument
everything has been given for an end
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews