Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 86
- Language: English
- Date Published: May, 2019
- ISBN: 978-1-948017-45-9
Praise
“We rarely mean what we say,” says Grace Curtis, in her second volume of poetry, Everything Gets Old. But, with word play and imagery, Curtis creates a world where “the eyes look at words and see something else altogether, something unspeakable.” She forces us to consider the contradictions between sound and silence, time and timelessness. These poems catch us off guard. They nag at our consciousness and our need to “know.” They are clear eyed and fearless. These poems will steal your heart and then your admiration. —Cathryn Essinger
Excerpt
Everything, Including Us, Gets Old
I
At night we rolled up the lawn around the house
plucking out all the vowels, saying
each one aloud as we’d been taught
to do as children.
At first it was a game
we perfected. We held the fruits
in our palms,
a cluster of Es, the As of apple.
We thought if we did this right
we’d live
long enough to see it through.
In the morning we rolled the lawn back out
stepping onto it, convincing ourselves
it was new again, that we’d done
our good deed. We scattered
the vowels back out over everything
to have something to do
the next night.
Author
Grace Curtis’ book, The Shape of a Box, was published in 2014 by Dos Madres Press. Her chapbook, The Surly Bonds of Earth, was selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2010 winner of the Lettre Sauvage chapbook contest and she has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Her prose and poetry can be found in such journals as Sou’wester, The Baltimore Review, Waccamaw Literary Journal, and others.
http://www.gracecurtispoetry.com