Dailies & Rushes

Book excerpt: A National Book Critic’s Circle Award-finalist: the “late but brilliant debut” volume that rocketed the acclaimed poet to prominence (The New York Times). In her first full-length volume of poems, Susan Kinsolving demonstrates an elegant mastery of craft that can only be achieved through decades of refinement. Dailies and Rushes is both a debut collection and a major work by an accomplished poet. Indeed, as Carol Muske points out in her review of this book for The New York Times, “each poem here seems an accomplishment, in the sense of a realized expression as well as structural finality.” With disarming insight, brutal irony, and playful half-buried puns that hit both the eye and the ear, “Kinsolving’s poems skate with a dark elegance on the thin ice between the upper air and a deepening sorrow, between the day’s figures and memory’s pattern. But she’s headed towards love: the distant shore, the beckoning warmth; and by the end of Dailies & Rushes she has gotten herself—and, to our delight and gratitude, brought us as well—triumphantly there” (J. D. McClatchy).