Celebration

Crysta Casey, Resident Poet. A Life Celebration and Selection of her Poetry.



This book is a brief introduction to the late poet, Crysta Casey.  A few poems, a sampling of her visual artwork, how she decided to become a poet, her struggle with schizophrenia and her battle with cancer.



I first became aware of Crysta Casey at a reading.  “My god, are those poems really that good?” I remember thinking, and saying to the curator at half-time, “That Crysta Casey is an astonishing poet,” at which point we were introduced. I bought her first book “Heart Clinic” as soon as I could and found the private reading experience as compelling and devastating as hearing her read the work aloud. Her work is the rare and remarkable kind of art  that blasts apart my heart.

REBECCA BROWN, author of "The Gifts of the Body"



A lived intensity focuses and collects at the center of Crysta Casey’s Green Cammie, and the reader is immediately in a world of believable curses and small praises delivered through acute observation. The terse language seems so right for the vagaries of war. Each poem, through its fidelity to simplicity and orality, tends to illuminate a far-reaching field.

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA on Crysta Casey's book, Green Cammie