Description
Kind: Perfectbound
Pages: 82
Language: English
Published: May, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-939929-12-9
Praise
In an era of poetic plain speak, when so few voices in the great cacophony of American verse rise to distinguish themselves from the dryness of daily talk, or even from each other, it’s a pleasure to encounter the sinewy lines and supple syntax, the rigorous intelligence and propulsive rhythms of Grace Curtis’s The Shape of a Box. – George Bilgere
In Grace Curtis’s The Shape of a Box a love of language as its own source and subject, with and without external reference, rubs elbows with the readily recognizable world of the everyday. Within the range of such a gaze, “A paycheck is a waterfall, firm and crisp,” and words “buzz around/my head like killer bees, cross the tract of no-man’s land/the DMZ.” With the clarity of Sherwood Anderson and the spirit of Gertrude Stein, Grace Curtis’s poems track the root of common experience in the extraordinary and the extraordinary in the familiar. – Stephen Haven
Excerpt
Olbers’ Paradox
It’s an important observation—the night sky
is black. If space is infinite,
then every point in the sky must point
to a star. The universe, not infinitely big,
not infinitely old, must end
at the edge of the yard, proof
that a river stops at its bend, that black
does not evade but absorbs,
that gray is immersion leaning toward
the reflection of everything, that a heart
yearns for what it thinks
it leans toward. Someone
once said to me, Gracie, all your answers
are inside of you, ignorance leaning
toward knowledge. What is left depends upon
what reflects, what photons are taken in, what
photons are reflected back. If you combine
red, green and blue crayons
you have black leaning toward night,
each color sharing equally in the argument
against infinity.
Author
Grace Curtis’ chapbook, The Surly Bonds of Earth, was selected by Stephen Dunn as the winner of the Lettre Sauvage 2010 Poetry Contest. She has had work in Baltimore Review, Scythe Literary Journal, The Chaffin Journal, Waccamaw Literary Journal, among others. Grace writes about poetry at www.N2Poetry.com.
