Everything Gets Old

by 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

86 pages, Paperback

Published May 10, 2019

About the author

Grace Curtis’ book, The Shape of a Box, was published this year 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. She has had prose and poetry in such journals as The Chaffin Journal, Red River Review, The Baltimore Review, Waccamaw Literary Journal, and Scythe. She blogs about poetry at www.N2Poetry.com. Her website is www.gracecurtispoetry.com.

Reviews

[Graeme Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grace Curtis offers a contemplative and linguistically rich poetry collection in Everything Gets Old, a work grounded in observation, embodiment, and philosophical reflection. Across its poems, Curtis explores themes of time, impermanence, and human perception, frequently addressing the reader through an inclusive “we” that blurs the line between individual and collective experience. The collection is marked by lyrical precision and intellectual playfulness, drawing on literary references and philosophical undertones while remaining deeply rooted in the physicality of lived experience.

Curtis’s poems often focus on the act of attention itself what we notice, what we overlook, and how meaning is constructed through language and memory. The work balances abstraction with grounded imagery, creating a reflective space where language becomes both subject and instrument. Everything Gets Old is a thoughtful and meditative collection that will appeal to readers of contemporary literary poetry who appreciate introspective, conceptually layered writing.