My Modest Blindness
Available now from Autofocus Books!
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' 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.
“There is something inescapably true in Russ Brakefield’s second collection, My Modest Blindness. At the surface, it is an exploration of a writer’s reckoning with ailment. A hybrid approach to capturing a fleeting visual landscape. A project that yields stunning observations of light, color and kinetic field. Perhaps in the spirit of field recording, as in his first collection, these poems make a journey through log and documentation. Along the way, Brakefield turns to old masters who navigated near or total blindness such as Milton, Audre Lorde and importantly, Jorge Luis Borges. Amidst the beauty of these poems, there is a generosity in their frankness and disclosure. And beneath all that, there is the honesty the poems come to know: ‘…and what is living / but trying to find a sea bird inside a sea bird colored storm,’ the poet writes. What a brave and haunting book.”
—francine j. harris, author of Here Is the Sweet Hand: Poems
“Out of a struggle with literary history, medical technology, and personal loss, Russell Brakefield gives us a prismatic, revelatory collection of poetry. We receive new angles from which to see what’s right in front of us. We understand the visible world as one that becomes both more uncanny and more vibrant as it fades or is distorted. From what begins as great deprivation—this maker’s vision—becomes the beginning of great wonder.”
— Mark Yakich, author of Poetry: A Survivor's Guide
“Carrying both the ache of loss and the sensory-rich beauty of the blurred and non-visual worlds, My Modest Blindness is deep and transfixing. Beyond the book’s apparent subject, Brakefield’s poems serve as a side-door portrait of the human mind—its taunting fickleness, its sprawling web of memories and connections, the way it accepts while pushing against.”
—Joshua James Amberson, author of Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes
“’What is belief but held breath,’ asks Russell Brakefield in these vital poems of a disappearing self and ‘learning to love different versions of shadow.’ Too often we say ‘to see’ when we mean ‘to know,’ and I love how beautifully and playfully these poems blur the line between sight and knowledge, between knowledge and belief.”
—James Tate Hill, author of Blind Man’s Bluff
Russell Brakefield is the author of Field Recordings (Wayne State University Press), My Modest Blindness (Autofocus Books) and Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West (Wayne State University Press). He is the winner of the 2021 International 3-Day Chapbook Contest for his book Our Natural Satellite (Harvard Square Press). His writing has appeared in the Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Poet Lore, Crab Orchard Review, HAD, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He has received fellowships from the University of Michigan Musical Society, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Parks Department. He is Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.
