poetry, prose & story
PRE-ODER DILAPITATIA TODAY!
Kelly Gray (she/her) is the author of Instructions for the Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021) and Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press, 2022), The Mating Calls //of the// Specter (Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, 2023), and Our Sodden Bond (MAYDAY Chapbook Prize, 2025). Her writing can be found in Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review, Cherry Tree, Lake Effect, ANMLY, Heavy Feather Review, Bear Review, Permafrost, Pithead Chapel, and the Northwest Review, among other places, and she is the recipient of the Neutrino Prize from Passages North, the ArtSurround Cohort Grant, and a participant in the juried Kenyon Review Poetry Workshop in 2023. Her second full length poetry collection Dilapitatia is coming out in Spring, 2025. “Several repairs appear to be in motion in these poems, one of which is, I think, traversing the cage of domestication separating ruthless, sensual wild(er)ness from our social creatures’ rationales that yet enable visiting calamities of sense upon one another. And 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, recipient of the National Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award |