Green Writers Press is proud to announce the first book in our poetry series (published in 2014), Winter Ready, by Vermont poet Leland Kinsey, has been named a finalist for the first annual Vermont Book Award.
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Winter Ready is a 96-page collection of new poems by a Vermont-based writer who draws from his impressive repertoire of observations and physical landscape of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont to bring to the reader poems with universal meaning and at times a painful acuity.
Kinsey opens the collection perched up high on the chimney top, working and observing his surroundings, and throughout the book, he never really gets down—he chronicles a people and a place and a time—and keeps the hard work of writing poetry hidden in the seeming effortless verse that is often funny and poignant, yet always sharp and clear.
In this new collection by a renowned Vermont poet, the setting is the same, but the voice rings true to the people and the land they inhabit, always respectful of the native peoples who came before and the awesome power of a glacier that carved a path in its wake. These poems evoke a fully realized view of the world the poet inhabits, an awareness of labor and its changing nature. The book moves through poem after glowing poem, evoking natural history, flora and fauna, with a place-based and focused attention.
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About the Author
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 MA, Leland has worked as a farmhand, printer, and horse trainer and has taught courses at Elderhostel. He has published six collections of poetry, including In the Rain Shadow (University Press of N.E.)
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Reviews
“A marvelous new collection of poems deeply rooted in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and rural life in general. All of Leland Kinsey’s poetry is closely connected to the natural world, with its expert (and highly entertaining) use of history, stories, characters – many from Leland Kinsey’s own family and ancestors – and images from nature, rural work and avocations, and the traditions of a very harsh but authentic, off-the-beaten track Vermont. His new collection, WINTER READY, is a chronicle, in poems, of the preparations for winter in the Northeast Kingdom, of a contemporary, rural narrator inextricably connected to the Kingdom, his family past and present, and the natural world.”
—Howard Frank Mosher, author of Stranger in the Kingdom
“For his entire artistic life, Leland Kinsey has been chronicling the profoundest Vermont anyone might possibly know. Native son, he has an eye for the telling physical detail (I am especially taken, for example, by ‘Upland Birds’), which he always renders with nonpareil accuracy. But within his vivid sensory world there also lies what I must far too roughly describe as traditional Vermont’s spiritual history. Pure and even cruel factuality, elegy, resolution, loss and affirmation – all these qualities fuse in poems like ‘Turkey Butcher,’ ‘Picking Stone,’ ‘Horseshoeing,’ on and on. One walks away from each of these marvels, as from every last poem in WINTER READY, with a sense not only of having been instructed but in some ineffable manner, renewed, even sanctified.”
—Sydney Lea, Vermont state poet laureate
Awards:
Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 2014
June, 2015— Winter Ready was shortlisted for the first annual Vermont Book Award:
http://digital.vpr.net/post/six-finalists-first-vermont-book-award-announced
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SPECS
Pub date: March 20, 2014 | $15.95 for print and $9.99 for e-Book
Paperback | 96 pages | 5.5 x 8.25 | 978-0-9899838-4-6
eBook | 978-0-9899838-5-3