Author Description

Intellectually astute, emotionally complex, imagistically provocative, Dana Curtis’s poetry, here assembled in this richly compelling new volume, plies the profound paradoxes and strange riddles of being human. The breadth of the poet’s regard is wide: she proffers a brilliant parade of poems containing meditations, laments, lyric complaints, love letters, and philosophical conundrums. She also explores physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s quantum theories (including his famed boxed cat experiment), concurring tacitly with him that “reality” may collapse onto one possibility or into another (opposite) one. These are poems that stretch the limits of consciousness, perception, and awareness, and that challenge our default notions of meaning and purpose. Curtis’s lush and powerful language rushes us into unknown territories of the psyche like a locomotive without brakes. Under her tutelage, we may learn to “worship the mathematics of light,” and “explain the necessity of metaphor,” knowing “that beauty is as much a lie as anything else.” Savor these gorgeous poems seared by molten fire and calmed by insight: they’re voiced by a true American original. —Maurya Simon, author of The Wilderness: New & Selected Poems, 2018 In Wave Particle Duality, Dana Curtis takes us into her nocturnal sphere, the film noir where fission splits the soul, and dark energy is all we have to go on. These are poems full of twisted desire and visionary clarity, pure need and thin hope. Throughout her language is as sharp as a pinprick. She cites Hogarth, which is apt, because Dana Curtis is a moralist, with gallows humor and a sense of the perverse. "Will you be my infidel," she asks? Oh, yes, we think. Just keep on talking. —David Lazar