Galvanized

Leland Kinsey's much-anticipated new and selected poetry collection, Galvanized, ranges from Kinsey's home in the rugged mountains of northern Vermont to the towering stone lighthouses and highland shielings of his ancestors' Scotland. Drawing from seven previous, acclaimed collections, and with more than twelve new poems, Kinsey takes us with him on his travels to the brawling rivers of Labrador, the slopes of Kilimanjaro, the wheat fields and dinosaur digs of Alberta, and the ranchos of the Tex-Mex border. 

With precise and original images – the Egyptian mummies used to stoke the furnaces of 19th-century steamships; the hardwood timbers of Swahili sailing freighters dating back three thousand years – Kinsey carries us deep into human history and into the natural world we were once all intimately a part of.  With him, we visit the rough, country ballfields and raw girlie shows of his youth, and experience the endlessly fascinating intricacies of the work he's done, as a farrier, printer, horseman, dairy farmer, teacher.  In language so exact and powerful it appears to be galvanized itself, Kinsey is a poet of the "reaches of the world," and our place in it.  He writes of love and loss, of family and friendship, of joy and sorrow, always with a hard-earned vision of hope, always straight from his own dauntless heart.

Leland Kinsey of Barton, VT

Leland Kinsey, was born and raised on a farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where his ancestors settled in the early 1800s. He conducted writing workshops for the Vermont Arts Council and the Children’s Literacy Foundation at over 100 schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. Leland worked as a farmhand, printer, and horse trainer, and wrote seven collections of poetry, including In the Rain Shadow, The Immigrant’s Contract, Winter Ready, and Galvanized: New & Selected Poems.Leland passed away September 14, 2016