poetry, prose & story
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Kelly Gray is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (MoonTide Press, 2021), Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press, 2022), MUD~ Fieldnotes from a Juvenile Psychiatric Institution (BottleCap Press, 2022). Her chapbook Quag Daughter is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in 2023. Gray's audio chapbook My Fingers are Whales and Other Stories of Cetology was created in collaboration with sound magician Meredith Johnson and is available to listen to here.
Gray is the recipient of the Neutrino Prize for her story "A Note on Sex and Death on the Beach" from Passages North and she was runner up for the Witness Literary Prize in Poetry from Witness Magazine. In 2022, she was granted the Creative Sonoma Cohort Prize in partnership with Pepperwood's Center for Conservation Science. Her writing has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Lake Effect, Witness Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Northwest Review, Passages North, Rust & Moth, Newfound, Permafrost and numerous other journals & anthologies. In the summer of 2023, she will be a participant in the Kenyon Review Workshop for Poetry. "Instructions for an Animal Body is a collection of poems full of intuitive wisdom; somehow ancient and timely at once. They remind us that time has extinguished neither violence nor kindheartedness. They track the small acts of brutality that lead to endless hatred, war, rape, and captivity, while murmuring a more compassionate approach—one that requires listening to softer voices. Gray shows us a restorative pathway for healing from violence, a consciousness-laden vision of reparation and reconstruction that requires a new language. In these poems, she delivers a story in which healing the child heals the mother; healing the mother heals the lover; healing the lover heals the trespasser; healing the trespasser heals the violator. There is hope in this new language that does not rely on capitulation to wrongdoing. Healing the violator might even heal the earth."
~Risa Denenberg, Co-founder of Headmistress Press, for CUlTURAL DAILY Read the full review at Cultural Daily |