Catheryn Essinger reviews Even-Turn by Grace Curtis in the online journal Rhino.
Grace Curtis has a talent for slipping deftly between a topic and our assumptions about it. In her new volume, Even-Turn, her third from Dos Madres Press, she asks seemingly easy questions, only to discover that they have difficult answers. For instance, she asks in the first poem, “Bird Hush as EvenSong,” “How many times do we ask / of ourselves to be / both here and away”—present in our daily lives and an intellectual observer as well (p. 1). She describes a bird as a “trapeze artist in mid-fall,” which could easily be a metaphor for the book itself, as she swings from one tight image to another, always catching the reader just in time (p. 1).
