Reviews of three new books. Only Bread, Only Light by Stephen Kuusisto (Copper Canyon Press, 104 pages, $14) Given poetry's reliance on visual imagery, I was at a loss as to how to begin writing about Stephen Kuusisto's Only Bread, Only Light. Initially, I hadn't wanted to review the poems in the context of his blindness. But that was before my attention was arrested by the titles of two fine poems: "Learning Braille at Thirty-Nine" and "Dante's Paradiso Poorly Read in Braille." Kuusisto's lively imagination is never more present than in the first poem, which leaves us with haunting, mysterious images: "My window stays open.../ Quick musical laughter/ Rises from the street/ I rub grains of the moon/...." It's as though he has reached through the open window, touched the moon, captured bits of its gritty surface and brought them back in his hands. In "Dante's Paradiso" there's little self-pity or bitterness, but one can sense the poet's frustration at having to learn finger reading so late in life: "I strain for color/ The preclusion of sight/ And put aside the book/ Paradiso en braille." Kuusisto's imagery relies heavily on reaching and touching. The poem ends with "Who the hell is this/ turning again to the window/ His fingers reaching.../ hands still touching/ a river no one can see?" In "Still," "you test ice/ by tossing old ice/ and listening." In the same poem we are surprised with: "old loves taste like iron/ new loves have no nails/ taste like snow." These compelling self-portraits take us toward an understanding of the unfathomable condition of blindness. But, more importantly, they lead us to a superb poet. Carlos Reyes Look at Me by Lauren Porosoff Mitchell (Leapfrog Press, 198 pages, $14.95)     Look at Me's best passages are whirlwinds of honesty, full of the same earnest poetry that marks Anaïs Nin's best writing. Sadly, these passages occur infrequently. Dana, the main character, is your typical red-haired Ashkenazi Jew-witch-geneticist looking for love in the greater Washington, D.C., area. The novel's cover and press materials promise that the details of Dana's copulative exploits (she's a sexual predator on the weekends) are both sexy and frank. But the latest paperback release of Fannie Farmer is hotter than anything author Lauren Porosoff Mitchell offers. It also has more plot. Mitchell's book is one of those wandering works that can't stick to story, character or theme. Perhaps this is a sketch of a young woman following a trajectory of self-realization charted by her sexuality, or perhaps it's just an extended Jane article. Mitchell is so enamored with her turns of phrase ("...and by the time he spit out the stone, it was stone-clean"), her rhetorical questions and the annoying device of inserting corny love letters into the text that she's forgotten to develop any ideas. Her characters are branded with many identifiers (Dana's boyfriend is a cocaine-addicted photographer whose Scottish grandfather was just made a saint) but completely lack identity. All of this could lead to an easily dismissible work. But there are those beautiful passages when the young author really does shine. Once Mitchell learns plot and shelves shallow word tics, she will probably fulfill the promise of those passages and create an outstanding novel. Until then, we are stuck with this unsatisfying preview. Lisa Lambert Escapism by Yi-Fu Tuan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 264 pages, $17.95) Is human culture, from the homeliest socket wrench to the world's great religions, nothing but an escape from the harsh realities of the natural, "real" world and our true place within it? Tuan thinks so, and he divides his examination of the things humans try escaping from into three categories--the natural world, our own animality, and other people--then spends the book's final chapters discussing the extremes our imaginations can create as ultimate escape: heaven and hell. From a fashionably postmodern, deconstructionist perspective, one could question Tuan's assumption that there is any one definitive "reality" from which to escape. To do so, however, would be both meanspirited and superfluous: Tuan is interested in examining the motives behind the creation of culture, not in splitting hairs over whether any fundamental truths exist. His effectiveness in proving his thesis seems, even to him, to be of secondary concern. Escapism's primary charm stems from the fact that Tuan admits the book may be his "final academic work." As such, it often reads like a string of favorite anecdotes culled from a career of studying the ways in which society and psychology lead us to de- and then re-humanize each other, and our amazing potential to imagine, and realize, worlds of both depraved horror and supernal beauty. These ruminations, though neither extensive nor startlingly original, make for enjoyable reading. If Tuan isn't quite convincing in his reductive analysis of humankind's motivation to create, it's easy to forgive him, because he's perfectly convincing in his delight for the diversity of human existence and escape. Dan DeWeese