Winner of the 2014 Gatewood Prize, selected by Dorothea Lasky
"Now this is it. A book that is a necessity, drawn from a star world, a real world, an unreal world, an alternate world, one that we come to again and again but do not find the words for easily ourselves. It is a world that reminds of me of Bernadette Mayer and Tracy K. Smith and Shakespeare. Crystal Curry's poems find the words we have longed to find easily and completely, in the clearest of letters, from one human to another, in the space of real conversation, packing beauty upon beauty upon beauty. It is a world where the interior lies on the one listening, which luckily is us, as she performs what the self is and can and cannot be, over and over again. Read this book." —Dorothea Lasky
"I read these poems because I want to know what will happen next. Each line, like a landscape reflected in a raindrop, provides an image weirdly resembling fate. I read on because I need to find out what will happen. I feel a little bit perverse. Far-seeing, precisely musical, funny, nearly narrative, somewhat scary, these are poems that contemplate what is possible, then do it." —Lucy Ives
"These poems hold us and humor us, resisting healing and self-help in favor of those intimacies through which we might realize a gain. Full of wit and surprise, But I Have Realized It rouses itself page after page, arcs forward and keeps going, finding its own 'upward mobility' and taking the reader with it." —Amaranth Borsuk
Heavy Feather Review review of But I Have Realized It
Crystal Curry was born in Greenville, Illinois, in 1974. She is the author of But I Have Realized It (Switchback Books, 2016), Our Chrome Arms of Gymnasium (Slope Editions, 2010), and Logotherapy Pant (Cosa Nostra Editions, 2008). She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received a Maytag Fellowship, a Teaching-Writing Fellowship and an Alberta Kelly Postgraduate Fellowship. Her poems have appeared widely in journals both off and online, such as Verse, Denver Quarterly, Conduit, Open City, Interim, and Action Yes.