poetry, prose & story
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Kelly Gray (she/hers) is author of Instructions for the Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021), Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press, 2022, Gold Medal recipient from IPPY), The Mating Calls //of the// Specter (Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, 2023), Our Sodden Bond (MAYDAY Chapbook Prize, 2025), and Dilapitatia (Moon Tide Press, 2025). Her poetry has been featured on The Slowdown Podcast (with Maggie Smith) as well as Poetry Daily, and she's received support through the Kenyon Review Workshop, the Neutrino Prize from Passages North, and a Creative Sonoma Cohort grant. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Boulevard, AGNI, New Letters, ZYZZYVA, Redivider, Cream City Review, Salt Hill Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Heavy Feather, Passages North, wildness, and the Northwest Review, among other places. Gray is a certified naturalist, death worker, and longtime reproductive justice educator, and in addition to her four other jobs, teaches poetry to rural folks in rural places. You can read more about where she's been and what she's thinking about here.
"It’s really the sensual that gets me—some restoration of faith in the body-poem union comes terrifically alive here, not the least due to the presence of damp animals, sharp instruments, bare stomachs, wafts of beer breath, truck exhaust, ‘thin femurs// jagged alps of possum teeth.’ An anxious Frankenwork. I frequently delight in feeling frightened; is that alright? I’m made to ask. Is delight an appropriate response to these images? Should one feel ‘appropriate’ when reading poetry? In a contemporary fog of content over-saturation, I can’t not advocate for cultivating this sort of self-checking trouble as a beacon of worthwhile writing."
~Justin Phillip Reed, author of Indecency, recipient of the National Book Award "I found that I needed to read the poems in Kelly Gray’s collection, Instructions for an Animal Body, slowly, carefully, more than once. In many ways, it was a challenging book for me to read; and challenging books are often my favorites. Each poem conjured a vivid image; each image got stuck somewhere in my psyche; each movement felt fraught and unfamiliar. These are persona poems of a rare nature—the speaker embodies them. They animate creatures and objects as if they are wild things. They speak as bears, whales, mushrooms, the moon, knives, salmon, redwood and cypress trees. Where I tend to live safely indoors and look at the world through the shelter of windows, these poems exist outside of any protective glass barrier. They make me feel ashamed of the comforts I claim."
~ Risa Denenberg, co-founder of Headmistress Press "Gray’s mastery of imagery is on vivid display in a voice resplendent with the tones and textures of the natural world. She is a body, thebody of the world: If you dig up this earth, you’ll find me. My face in the mud, / small animals denned in my stomach. Gray is both athletic and graceful in her use of forms, long lines and short, multipart poems and fragments. Throughout, she creates a dreamscape of all that is ending in this world, and how to love it. Enter this beautiful obsession with your mouth and heart open, the fox so gone you have her ear bones in your eyes."
~Subhaga Crystal Bacon, author of the Lambda Literary Finalist, Transitory |