"I love this chapbook. Each poem sifts securely ingrained inside my body's membrane. The Mating Calls of a Specter establishes Kelly Gray as a vital voice of our generation. The sensual imagery and precise diction concoct a haunting world unafraid to illuminate this narrator's harrowing truth, leaving me to ponder many of life's questions, including, "Do I owe you blood/on the page or a healing?" A necessary read. "
--Sarah Levine, author of Each Knuckle with Sugar (Driftwood Press)
Final judge Justin Phillip Reed has selected Kelly Gray’s The Mating Calls of a Specter as the winner of The Tusculum Review 2023 Poetry Chapbook Prize.
“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 (winner of the National Book Award), The Malevolent Volume, and the forthcoming With Bloom Upon Them and Also With Blood
--Sarah Levine, author of Each Knuckle with Sugar (Driftwood Press)
Final judge Justin Phillip Reed has selected Kelly Gray’s The Mating Calls of a Specter as the winner of The Tusculum Review 2023 Poetry Chapbook Prize.
“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 (winner of the National Book Award), The Malevolent Volume, and the forthcoming With Bloom Upon Them and Also With Blood
"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
In Instructions for an Animal Body, Kelly Gray leads readers on a journey where body is both the death ground of grief and the birthplace of resilience. Using natural history to flip human constructs around predator and prey, violence and sensuality, Gray reimagines a lush modern mythology. From the work of vultures to weather systems between legs, these poems will transport you into a gritty world where boundaries between beasts and humans merge and the beautiful monster-within reigns supreme.
Available at Moon Tide Press.
--Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir
In Instructions for an Animal Body, Kelly Gray leads readers on a journey where body is both the death ground of grief and the birthplace of resilience. Using natural history to flip human constructs around predator and prey, violence and sensuality, Gray reimagines a lush modern mythology. From the work of vultures to weather systems between legs, these poems will transport you into a gritty world where boundaries between beasts and humans merge and the beautiful monster-within reigns supreme.
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!
"Kelly Gray has challenged and transformed the boundaries of experiencing poetry. Her micro-chapbook, My Fingers Are Whales and other stories of Cetology not only enraptures readers with an intense control over line and image, it’s also accompanied by audio storytelling designed by Meredith Johnson, voice acting by Kelly Gray and Gage Opdenbrouw to further transport the reader. This undertaking is a result of pure and boundless passion.
Gray shows how we hand down tradition and familial culture to our children and how through watching and learning, through curiosity, they shape it into their own. These poems explore and confront the danger, reality, and beauty of whales and through association, of the speaker’s family as well: 'He knew not what he killed, only what he loved.'
Here is a “topographical map of hearts” charted through a range of forms, extraordinary world building, and a mysticism that lingers well past the last line. My Fingers Are Whales and other stories of Cetology considers the “future of folklore” and ultimately, is a manifestation of “ear-bones” –with it, we too can hear the ocean."
~Emilee Kinney, review in the Inflectionist Review
LISTEN HERE:
Gray shows how we hand down tradition and familial culture to our children and how through watching and learning, through curiosity, they shape it into their own. These poems explore and confront the danger, reality, and beauty of whales and through association, of the speaker’s family as well: 'He knew not what he killed, only what he loved.'
Here is a “topographical map of hearts” charted through a range of forms, extraordinary world building, and a mysticism that lingers well past the last line. My Fingers Are Whales and other stories of Cetology considers the “future of folklore” and ultimately, is a manifestation of “ear-bones” –with it, we too can hear the ocean."
~Emilee Kinney, review in the Inflectionist Review
LISTEN HERE:
In MUD~ Field Notes from a Juvenile Psychiatric Institution, Kelly Gray paints a surreal landscape from the rooms of a psychiatric ward bound to outdated models of clinical psychology.
Both political and deeply intimate, MUD questions the role of institutional violence and refuge, while rooting us into a body unhinged by societal norms. Each poem mimics the world they come from; sometimes clinical, sometimes panting with fear, they are both earnest and self aware. Poems written as if incantations conjure imaginary dogs, sporks digging into throats, patients urinating on patients, and children force-fed medication that would later be found to cause suicidal ideations. Gray’s collection is seamlessly crafted to take your body and mind on a ride as true as any American dream; dark, moody and unapologetically horrifying.
ORDER from Bottlecap Press!
Both political and deeply intimate, MUD questions the role of institutional violence and refuge, while rooting us into a body unhinged by societal norms. Each poem mimics the world they come from; sometimes clinical, sometimes panting with fear, they are both earnest and self aware. Poems written as if incantations conjure imaginary dogs, sporks digging into throats, patients urinating on patients, and children force-fed medication that would later be found to cause suicidal ideations. Gray’s collection is seamlessly crafted to take your body and mind on a ride as true as any American dream; dark, moody and unapologetically horrifying.
ORDER from Bottlecap Press!