A review of my poems published in the Fall 2013 issue
of Tin House:

“Kimberly Grey’s “System of Becoming Quite” is a poem about “quietness,” containing multiple levels that are all well-crafted. This poem expresses how love can come to seem perfect. To express the inability to truly become something, Grey uses the suffix “-ish” multiple times to convey having the likeness of something: “. . . once we were happyish people, we were / unrecognizable in our yellowish folds. It was / a pretty way to start . . .” The “happyish” explains a certain romanticism that often happens when people look back on horrible relationships and say that at the beginning they were good. Grey continues: “almost beaming. If it is brutal, then brutalish / is a way to live. Lovers never sufficiently love / anything. It’s a wildish thing . . .”

Even in the moments when Grey is not using “-ish” to convey “quiteness” the orchestration of words still convey it—“almost beaming” and “lovers never sufficiently love” for example—all of these things work together to display the trivial attempts we all make to do something perfectly or embody something perfectly. This is one of two “System” poems Grey has in this issue of Tin House and is part of a bigger project Grey has been working on. All are well worth reading.”

Thanks to Melanie Tague for her kind words about my work. Read the full review here!

My poem “Conjugating” was included as part of the feature in the 40th Anniversary Time Travel Issue of Black Warrior Review. Buy a copy of this wonderful issue (which includes amazing work by Solmaz Sharif, Nick Sturm and more!) here.

My poem “Somehow We Are National” was published in the awesome Fall Issue of Gulf Coast. Buy your own copy here.

Big thanks to the editors of Columbia Poetry Review and The Paris-American for nominating my work for a 2014 Pushcart Prize.

I have new work forthcoming in 2014 in The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere.