Even Turn by Grace Curtis

Even-Turn by Grace Curtis

$20.00

The poems in Even-Turn inhabit the delicate spaces between perception and memory, exploring how clarity often arrives through indirection. A floater crossing the eye, the true sound of a shell held to the ear, a river glimpsed and remembered: small anomalies of seeing become apertures into deeper experience. Through spare, vivid language, the work traces the edges of what is known and unknown, celebrating the brief moments when the ordinary world flickers into revelation. At once lyrical and precise, these poems invite the reader into a world where attention itself becomes a form of devotion — and where even the faintest gesture can offer the possibility of transformation.

In these poems, perception blurs into memory, and small moments of attention open onto vast interior landscapes. Moving between clarity and mystery, the collection invites readers to dwell in the quiet strangeness of the everyday — where a flicker of light, a fragment of memory, or a half-heard song can reveal the whole architecture of a life.

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Description

  • Kind: Perfectbound
  • Pages: 78
  • Language: English
  • Date Published: September 2025
  • ISBN  978-1-962847-34-6

Excerpt

The Color of Sound

I
The sound inside a seashell or in the cup of a palm held to the ear, is not really the ocean, but rather all the surrounding sounds gathered into a small chamber: resonance. Less beach than trucks on a distant highway, less sunshine and sand than laundry and heat. Remember the time you heard a woman laugh as she watched a car on fire in a grocery store parking lot? Nerves, she said to no one. Sometimes all we can know of each other is what we already know of ourselves.

II
Ambient noise is not a collection of existing sounds but rather a filtering out of the intentional:  what remains after all the guests have left. To mentally relive a conversation, is to throw a pebble into a pool of white noise, and to, for a moment, watch the ripple it creates on an inner surface.

III
The Venus Flytrap easily distinguishes between nutritional prey and mere happenstance—two trigger-hairs must be touched in succession, or one hair touched twice before it snaps shut. Few people know that Ernest Hemingway lost a whole suitcase-full of unpublished manuscripts. To Ezra Pound, he wrote, I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenalia?  Sometimes, what we most want to hear eludes us.

IV
A hiccup is a private conversation, occasionally overheard by others—silence playing with spasmodic sound. Pink noise, on the other hand, contains sound from across the entire spectrum. With each elevation in pitch, the volume softens creating something deep and soothing. Comparable to a distant waterfall; so reminiscent of memory, it can evoke the scent of apple blossom.

Author

Grace CurtisGrace Curtis has two full-length collections, The Shape of a Box, and Everything Gets Old, available from Dos Madres Press. Her book, The Surly Bonds of Earth, was the winner of the Lettre Sauvage Press chapbook contest, is available from the press. She has had numerous poems published in journals, and her work as been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. Her website is N2Poetry.com.

 

Additional information

Weight 5.5 oz
Dimensions 9 × 6 × .25 in

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