Winter Ready

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. 

Kinsey opens the collection perched up high on a 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, an awareness of labor and its changing nature. The poems evoke natural history, flora and fauna, with a place-based and focused attention.

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