In The Rain Shadow

In his latest collection, Leland Kinsey, the "unofficial poet laureate of the Northeast Kingdom" (Vermont Sunday Magazine), brings the same careful attention and gift for observation to the people and landscape of Tanzania that he regularly has applied to the contours of northern Vermont. In poems that document his encounters with a strange-yet-familiar landscape, Kinsey distills his experience and that of his first cousin, who has lived and worked there for twenty years, into straightforward yet highly polished language that suits the austerity of rural Africa as well as it does that of the Northeast Kingdom. Characteristically clear and powerful, these poems keenly appreciate both the similarities and the differences between African life and the life Kinsey knows in Vermont.