But I Have Realized It

Poetry. "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 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, 2014 Gatewood Prize judge

"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