Quiet Kid **Mark Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award** by Grace Carras

Grace Carras‘ wise poems hold a wry and ecstatic heartbeat at the center of each page. This is a poet of fire and elemental courage who will draw you to vivid places where “…you could sculpt birds from this salt.”

–Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic

“Find me,” Grace Carras instructs in an early poem in her wonderful new chapbook called Quiet Kid.  It’s an invitation both to herself and us as she maps (as we watch her map) an interior dialogue full of unquiet as she seeks to transcend the “frog” in her, the “mismatch,”  and find a gravity all her own. It’s in her somewhere as she says in that same early poem and everywhere on the page throughout the book as she writes with a fearless figurative imagination and sense of formal play that belies the fidgeting at the core of this process. She is not the “squishy type,” but feels “disassembled.” She seems “bear-eaten”  and is “more boom / than bloom.” She is “blood and dirt and root / windfall phantom haunting [her]self.” And yet for all this “running through dark rooms,” “She breathes. / She comes out alive.” Like lightning. A cascading, quickening movement through mind and body and word that “shake[s] [us] like we’re dancing.”

–Dennis Hinrichsen, author of [q / lear] and Greater Lansing Poet Laureate Emeritus