"Palm Wine" selected poems

Palm Wine explores the beginning of the poet's journey toward self-identity, investigating how she is propelled toward her own destiny by the act of naming. The poet moves through experiences that bring her inexorably out of the cocoon of childhood to the danger of being a woman in a man's world. Searching for what it means to be truly human, she immerses herself in the cultures of West Africa, India, Eastern Europe, always returning to her roots in Sebastopol, California. Poet Michael Gushue writes that Ms. Kuznick's poems "are infused with the personal and lyrical, but also move outward to history and our human, communal concerns. They are filled with vivid images that are also an aural delight, and that come from closely looking at and attending to the world. And while they reach out towards an insight or truth, it is one shaded by the larger uncertainties of our time.".