“I can sing two songs, one a lullaby, one a murder ballad,” Kelly Gray writes in Dilapitatia, a book that investigates fantasy and construct as cure for ruin, for dilapidation. The voice in this astonishing book startles with wisdom, and sparkles with lyricism, and doesn’t take a single prisoner. “When boys fuck me I cum neatly crafted ballads,” she writes, “and it hurts/ because there are never stories with endings.” And while these poems hurt, there is some consolation—a toughness, a testament to survival. “This farm we paid three dollars to walk through,” Gray says, “cannot hold us.” Here are poems that do more than hold us: they take the “tired morphology// of the living” and return it to us burnished, kissed-and-made-better. “It looks like a healing,” one poem ends, “like someone walked off alive.”
~James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy
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~James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy
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Recipient of The Tusculum Review 2023 Poetry Chapbook Prize, judged by Justin Phillip Reed!
“I am well past beginning to detest an about-ness approach to art that pretends any creativity related to an “issue” in public discourse ought to avail itself to immediate and total interpretation, and that this happens in a unilateral relation of consumption. Thankfully, the text of The Mating Calls of a Specter ingests me also, and its innards are largely unreasonable and abysmal, not a moral machine...The idea that incredible moments must be—somehow, perhaps by artificial flirtation with doubt--earned does not stand in this book; lose your mind. The line break, the comma, the smallest drop of caesura invents a corner around which another ghost (or the same?) waits, changed, its old skins still slick on the trail. Ruin can be newness with its appendages reassembled. I’m morphed too, in my pursuit: the eros of reading."
~Justin Phillip Reed, author of Indecency, recipient of the National Book Award
“I am well past beginning to detest an about-ness approach to art that pretends any creativity related to an “issue” in public discourse ought to avail itself to immediate and total interpretation, and that this happens in a unilateral relation of consumption. Thankfully, the text of The Mating Calls of a Specter ingests me also, and its innards are largely unreasonable and abysmal, not a moral machine...The idea that incredible moments must be—somehow, perhaps by artificial flirtation with doubt--earned does not stand in this book; lose your mind. The line break, the comma, the smallest drop of caesura invents a corner around which another ghost (or the same?) waits, changed, its old skins still slick on the trail. Ruin can be newness with its appendages reassembled. I’m morphed too, in my pursuit: the eros of reading."
~Justin Phillip Reed, author of Indecency, recipient of the National Book Award
“I feel held in its currents of tenderness and terror— in Our Sodden Bond’s folkloric and fabulist reconstruction of girlhood as both wounding and weapon, makes it possible for childhood trauma to alchemize into a mythological resurrection. ‘Some deaths were folded up like origami and passed back and forth / like a blunt.’ Gendered violence and CSA, though devastating realities, Our Sodden Bond manifests narratives with a spiritual pulse from survival and play as liberation.”
– Angela Peñaredondo, 2024 Micro-Chapbook Contest Judge
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"Raw, enchanted and poetically powerful, Instructions for an Animal Body places human experience - in particular female life - solidly in the realm of nature, full of cruelty and glory, and sublime survival. A dazzling collection."
--Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir
Available at Moon Tide Press
"In Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife writer Kelly Gray makes the universe edible. Filled with bodies and images that never cease to bloom, this collection gave me a chorus to sing with when the world seems like it's ending. With lines that spill like intimate prophecies, these poems invite us to dance with our animal selves and question the role of gender in the stories we tell about the world. Through forms that stretch and fold, this collection weaves fabulist ancestries--leading the reader on a delightful and healing escapade through galaxy-corridors of inheritance. Speakers call out into the wild conjuring kinship and crafting pathways home. Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife leaves us all, as Grey writes, 'Hungry. / Snapping./ Blooming."
~Robin Gow, author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy and A Million Quiet Revolutions
ORDER your limited edition printed with a full color cover, including a transparent dust jacket, with offset printing, black and white interior on cream-colored matte pages, custom end sheets, and 8+ illustrations from Quarter Press!
~Robin Gow, author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy and A Million Quiet Revolutions
ORDER your limited edition printed with a full color cover, including a transparent dust jacket, with offset printing, black and white interior on cream-colored matte pages, custom end sheets, and 8+ illustrations from Quarter Press!