"Bearpond Books

Leland Kinsey was born and raised on a farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where his ancestors settled in the early 1800s. He has conducted writing workshops for the Vermont Arts Council and the Children’s Literacy Foundation at over 100 schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. Since receiving his M.A., Leland has worked as a farmhand, printer, horse trainer and has taught courses at Elderhostel in writing, birding, astronomy and canoeing. He has published four books of poetry, including most recently The Immigrant’s Contract. Leland is known as the “unofficial poet laureate of the Northeast Kingdom”.

In this new collection of linked poems, Leland Kinsey offers another installment of his moving and powerful narrative verse. Arriving in the United States by horse-and-carriage as a child, the main character of this sequence embodies the cultural transformation that so many American families have endured. Kinsey’s verse details the struggle of the twentieth century – a chronicle of displacement, work, and transformation – in bold, crisp detail. No subject appears beyond his grasp: travels through the Canadian wilderness, a baseball game in Florida, the sabotage of archaeology, a night crossing to Cuba, a lonesome poacher’s soliloquy.