Quiet Kid by Grace Carras
Mark Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award, 2020
Grace Carras’s debut chapbook, Quiet Kid, had a tough act to follow. I had soaked up Grace’s poems at public readings for two years, marveling at how her soft voice instantly silenced the audience and filled the room. Fortunately, her poems in print manage to do the very same thing.
Having served the Lansing-area poet community as co-emcee of the Poetry Room, and Michigan State University as a member of the nationally-competing slam team, Grace was roundly applauded when her chapbook took first prize in the Mark Ritzenhein Emerging Poets contest.
When the book arrived at last, I looked eagerly for old favorites like “for the quiet kids who’ve been told to ‘Speak Up,’” remembering how its lines embodied the same feeling they describe, of lightning creating a vacuum that calls forth thunder. “Thunder doesn’t care who hears it,” she writes, and later on recalls “those days you became the word absence,” and then triumphantly concludes: “How many people do you know with a voice like lightning?”
I remembered and found some of the ingenious frames she creates for her poems—“excerpts from voicemails of lovers or exes,” “looking at my mother in four rooms,” “a portrait of my favorite color”—and also some of the most unexpected inversions on familiar forms and tropes. An epithalamium that yanks together images like “if I’m a dog fart, you’re the hot car that contains me.” A Persephone who “bites, scratches and kicks all the way to Hell,” whose epigraph is cummings’s “there is some shit I will not eat.” A tribute to gathered poets who do not only “blossom in the stage light,” but also “carry explosions / in [their] mouths.”
Fierce, powerful, and delicate; startling, original, and skilled: this is what a debut poetry chapbook should be. I recommend it highly.
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Cheryl Caesar lived in Paris, Tuscany, and Sligo for 25 years; she earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne. She teaches writing at Michigan State University and publishes poems in North America, Europe, and Africa. Her book Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era is available from Amazon.