Grace Curtis

Everything Gets Old Grace Curtis

Poetry. 'Have you ever noticed / how things wait...?' Grace Curtis asks in the opening poem of EVERYTHING GETS OLD. 'I want this to be about wingspan / and instinct, ' she writes, and then delivers on this promise. The poems in this book are poems of attention, holding and held by the breadth of Curtis' imagination, poetic skill, linguistic playfulness and interests (including those literary--as an example, the title of the opening poem is a reference to those who waited for Godot), and are infused by the breath of an embodied wisdom. Everything does get old, including the speaker of these poems and the inclusive 'we' to whom they are often spoken--sometimes a particular other or others, sometimes all of us on the other side of Curtis' page. At its heart, EVERYTHING GETS OLD is about what it means to be human in our perfectly imperfect bodies ('In our efforts to be exact / we created / create exact failure'). Curtis directs us in the final poem, 'The Storyteller' to 'look at what we ignore most days, ' and we readers are grateful for the honor of having, through Curtis' poems, done exactly that.--Pauletta Hansel