Aug 20, 2024

A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing

Now available here, here, and here.

Ingenious out of necessity, these essays erupt from the exile of the author by her mother. In them, Kimberly Grey harnesses her formidable intellectual and creative resources in an effort to create coherence out of absolute dislocation. To do so, she calls on—beseeches—dozens of brilliant thinkers and artists (among them Etel Adnan, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Anna Freud, Mina Loy, Elaine Scarry, Gertrude Stein, and Simone Weil) to help her survive, if not fully comprehend, her banishment. By thinking her pain rather than feeling it, she becomes an expert witness to her own trauma, pondering motherhood even as her daughterhood has been rescinded.

Synthesizing creative writing and theory, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing is a powerful testament to the essay’s potential to help us persevere.

What readers are saying:

“A beautiful, heartbreaking, intellectual, emotionally complex book of essays about mothers and daughters and relationships that end whether or not we want them to. Highly recommend! Each page is pure poetry.”

“Wow! A tour de force! “A Mother is An Intellectual Thing” pushes the frontier wide open in the essay poem hybrid (and makes you certain boundaries are not needed) with an unscripted, unbeatable, mind-opening intellectual foray, yet riven with musical threads that hold it tightly into movements in dialogue with one another. It’s sooooooo smart! and sharp! You can’t help but learn some new insight as KG digs in deep, questioning all that she has known and not known in a way that cracks open the other, pain, healing, love, and belonging that makes you want to notice your breathing differently.”

“‘A mother can dislocate you. No one tells you this, so I will do the telling,’ the book begins.
Vulnerable, beautiful, and heartbreaking.”

“I’m obsessed with this essay collection and the way Grey uses theory and poetry to investigate her experience of estrangement. It’s a feminist action, constantly obsessing over narrative and completeness and rarely delivering it. A subversive and inventive book!”

“A must-read for anyone who enjoys collections that defy disciplinary boundaries. These essays combine creative writing, theory, psychology, and mathematics to think through trauma–“a mother can teach you to count, to calculate her.” Relentless in both its rigor and vulnerability, this is book that refuses to flinch in the face of loss: “just as language moves us, we must move language.”

Feb 23, 2023

New book!

A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing: Essays
forthcoming from Persea books in November 2023

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*I’m available for readings and classroom visits. Please use the contact form to connect.

Pre-Order

Dec 3, 2020

SYSTEMS FOR THE FUTURE OF FEELING

Upcoming Readings

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Monday December 7:

KGB Virtual Reading with Anne Carson & Thomas Mallon

7 PM EST (time may change)

*

Thursday December 10:

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Discussion and Q&A

8:30 PM CST

*

Thursday December 17:

Skylark Bookshop with Laura Cronk & Anne Marie Macari

7 PM CST (virtual)

*

Thursday April 8:

The Mercantile Library.

Cincinnati, Ohio. Reading & Book Party with Madeleine Wattenberg

6:30 PM EST

 

Feb 27, 2020

SYSTEMS FOR THE FUTURE OF FEELING

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Cover Image: Picture of the Starting Point by Hilma Af Klint
Cover Design by Small Stuff NYC

PRE-ORDER NOW!

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Publication date: December 8, 2020
$15.95 • 80 pages • ISBN 978-0-89255-520-8
Reading & review copy requests: [email protected]
www.perseabooks.com • www.kimberlymgrey.com

May 9, 2016

The Opposite of Light

FULLBOOKCOVER

Order the Book:

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LIBRARY JOURNAL Reviewed by Barbara Hoffert

In this dazzling book, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Grey does something brave. She investigates contemporary marriage without sounding ironic, treacly, or angry. It’s a process (“If I am building you, I have/ forgiven you” says the opener, and the penultimate poem is titled “Rules of Becoming”). There’s ambivalence and divergence (“I wanted a lovemonger./ You were a warmonger”), and disillusionment is inevitably folded in (“Always the sound of/ a sad wonder trumpet”). But if Grey sees “No way to love/ each other but with these ancient bodies,” she is also intent on looking at love differently in a different age; “nothing as old-fashioned as making/ a lover with a rib,” she proclaims, comparing herself and the beloved to “toy cars, electric and modern.” ­VERDICT Writing about love could be worn, but this is fresh and enticing; for all readers, even if the language sometimes challenges.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Grey raises a wall of sound while meditating on love, power, and control in her debut collection, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry: “Built your truss, built your small back,/ all I could muster, all cheek and luck.” Grey lures readers into a world full of clever language and heartfelt metaphor. “Love is not an actual helmet. It is/ fashionable. We wear it to feel heavy/ with gold,” she writes. As Grey posits lively dichotomies, those ups and downs bleed through the text to enact the movement of relationships through time. In the aptly named “Fragments of Time,” reality sets in; “I want to tell you how it splits/ me how I am so sad for/ what strays you fix your hair you leave.” Memories of experience, unfocused and non-linear, make brief, star-like appearances. “What we’ll always have becomes something we lost,/ becomes something we want, becomes sadness,” Grey writes. In the face of the inevitable death—and subsequent mourning—that comes with love, she presents readers with words that are immediate and alive. Excavating her own shared, mundane experiences, Grey finds both deep truths within those fleeting joys and a fresh way to present a very old idea

BOOKLIST Reviewed by Janet St. John

In her debut collection, Grey, a recent Wallace Stegner fellow, uses mental and linguistic acrobatics to explore what modern love and marriage really looks like. Her poems involve a search for symmetry, as the first and second halves of the book mirror and complete each other like lovers by revisiting paired topics and themes of invention and reinvention, memory’s deconstruction and reconstruction, and relationships’ beginnings and endings. The poems further this mirroring dance within their lines, as in “What we’ll always have becomes something we lost,” and through such titles as “The Functions of X and Y” and “The Function of You and I.” It’s apt that light and its opposite represent the collection overall, since the poems often bounce in tone and feeling between brightness and shadow. There’s no doubt Grey took exceptional care in writing, revising, and compiling these poems. They chime and resonate like deftly struck, fine crystal.

Reviewed by SCOUT

In Kimberly Grey’s debut, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize, the opposite of light is not darkness but “light’s potential”—dark because unknown, perhaps, but with the possibility “to change us into that thing we never were / before.” Grey’s subject is marriage, or the conjugation of a you and an I, and her poems traverse the emotional terrain of coupling while grammatically conjugating what togetherness looks and feels like—“We love, you / have loved I will love/ you”—in the twenty-first century.

Grey’s poems function as finely tuned objects, with rhetoric providing the engines. She favors anaphora (“Built your truss, built your small back, / all I could muster, all cheek and luck./ Built your hum to crescendo…”) and the subjunctive voice (“If we weren’t starving for one thing, / we’d starve for another”), using both to spin out gestures or imaginative stances as far as they will go, harnessing syntax and juxtaposition to enact the process—sometimes smooth, sometimes fraught—of the I and you becoming we. One of her recurring questions is how love survives our contemporary context, where daily “the newspaper says / the world is in no way merciful” and “[t]here are too many / machines to teach / us sadness.” In “Modern Sentences,” Grey uses terms that millienials will understand:

…Let’s be vegan.
Let’s drive a Prius. Let’s find a robot
to make our bed and bring us tea.
My dear, I promise I’ll homeschool
you if you homeschool me. I am
a 21st-century wife. Tonight I’ll touch
you in some otherworldly way
and we’ll copyright it, YouTube it…

But in opposition to the technological idiosyncrasies modern love withstands, the poem ends with a low-fi declaration: “No way to love / each other but with these ancient bodies.” The Opposite of Light does not make light of the business of joining one’s life to another, and Grey thrives in the space of possibility, where what comes next, although not mapped, is welcome. The book’s final lines from the tour-de-force poem “The First Marriage” bear out this paradox: “We were fine / inside that egg, one yolk to get us through. Then with a squawk and a flap, she said I-love-you- / god-speed and cracked us in two.”

Review by Ron Slate

We are archaic — in our sources, impulses, outreaches and aloneness. They say dogs have stereo olfaction — they can smell two things at once through independent nostrils. Some poets have dual sensors, too – one for the triggering situation, one for the archaic presence within it. By necessity, the initial brief notices of Kimberly Grey’s first book of poems, The Opposite of Light, name marriage as the work’s situation. But a long compulsion to keep returning to and leaping from its marital materials comprises its own situation. The sensing of both the archaic and the anarchic is the occasion.

Grey’s poems are perpetual clarifications that resist too much clarification. There can be no probing without uncertainty, without exposing the unrefined to the air. Two gestural figures share an interior space but suggest discrete vectors. As the relationship or marriage loses momentum, the separated person is less loved and perhaps wonders about her lovability. It’s provocative to me, then, that the strangely seductive intimacy of Grey’s work intensifies my desire to pass into the world she enacts through her own language. Separation and space intensify what may be shared. Somehow, we readers are part of the lovers’ grief. The domestic situation goes global.

SOMEHOW, WE ARE A WE

So many beautiful, manageable heads. If only we were
allowed a hundred different joys. What a radical idea.
No
 goodness will get you far. Your loveliness is measured
by the number of poor things you’ve dazzled. Add in
an old city ruin, and some translated light, which
 is
foreign and sounds cool, but cannot be understood.
Goodness is contrived. No one wants it. It’s before
breakfast and already our hearts have gone bad.
Yesterday I watched two birds fight over the same
blue square of sky. The philosophers say if you take
something you don’t love in your arms and unhurt it,
you will be happy. But we are not happy. Everything
electrical is not light. All over there are crowds
of people waiting to be caressed. Every bed in the world
was manufactured for just a few. We are magnolia
white, spoon light, leftover flight. We are spiny
and unforgivable. It is good to ache and be wise for it.
You come back in the door that I’ve walked out of.
It’s ceremonial. It’s revolving. The back of your beautiful
head. Your hands are here; I can’t tell where, but it is
the best kind of uncertainty. Happiness is when every
thing 
inside you goes out and comes back in, newly.

There is an indifference of heart here that seizes like happiness. Detachment is not just a mood but a condition with dimension. What is this “goodness” that must be renounced? She is avowing complicity with what dismays and bewilders her. An affirmation in no need of serenity. The conventional alternative requires the sort of orderliness that sanctions marriage in the first place – but something archaic in her bristles at the interpreted world. There is also the archaic will to survive — there may not be recrimination and resentment for the Other, but the poems represent a sort of victory. What else is real living but a return to oneself – “when every / thing inside you goes out and comes back in, newly”? The generosity of The Opposite of Light is the revolving door “I’ve walked out of” – since we follow her through it and come back in.

In a Kenyon Review interview, Grey points to Alice Fulton as an influence and quotes the latter’s preference for “an expatriate space … a linguistic state that is both foreign and available to readers … a slightly skewed domain where things are freshly felt because they are freshly valid.” Fulton coined the term “fractal poetics” to describe a disinterest in (no, revulsion of) reproducing speech and a suspicion of self-credit-reflection and sincerity. When Grey says “Goodness is contrived,” she is heckling the poem that must be rejected for the one created out of crudeness (even in its unwritten state, the spurned poem is an adversary).

“Marriage / is a wilderness we must all come out / of,” she writes in “Heroic Sentences,” but having come out she won’t turn away or take up other topics. Yet Grey avoids the dreadful inertia of “project” books. She excels sonically in the manner of predecessors like Heather McHugh and Lisa Russ Spaar. Just when a string of declarative phrases begins to predict themselves, she reshuffles the deck. She offers various shapes on the page. In “We Are Mostly Merciful, “she writes, “The minor part of me thinks obsession is what kills / thinking. The major part thinks obsession makes the world / go round.” Exactly. This rather self-knowing statement (I appreciate her risk of it) spells out the book’s embedded tension – the necessary reticence of poetry grating against the necessary outburst of poetry. To watch and hear a young poet managing this rare feat is marvelous entertainment and dizzying pleasure.

In “We Are Mostly Alright” she writes, “We have never loved / the world only the words / we used to describe it.” This alleged indictment of words doesn’t quite fit — though in Grey’s world, one must make allowances for contradiction. Some of the self-sniping and mordant slaps at the relationship, like “We furnish / our losses with an armchair and stove,” come too easily at times — but Grey generally manages to sustain the active, propulsive, digressive character of the central poems. Her emphasis from the start is on invention — and we set an expectation early on for inventive phrasing, even as she deflates her own ambition, or seems to for the moment: “We keep inventing / newfangled ways to be in the world” and “Tonight I’ll touch / you in some otherworldly way / and we’ll copyright it, YouTube it, / tell the general public this is our way / of being modern” (from “Modern Sentences”).

Desire for the Other doesn’t dissipate in these poems of a marriage’s deconstruction — a “you” is invented in the opening poem and addressed repeatedly. “Meditation in B” concludes, “We are close to bed now. / One late night snack. I’m butter // you’re bread. We can be prison food, happily. And if / hungry is beautiful in any of these ways, I want to / eat I want to eat I want to eat it.” As loss dominates throughout, Grey maintains an agility that prevents the blandishments of mere tone from diluting the forceful, original impulses of expression — as in these lines ending “Wound! Out from Behind Two Crouching Masses of the World the Word Leapt”:

… The distance between two alike things. The distance between two unlike things.
The decision I must make now. Whether or not we are fastened together like moth wings or clam shells. Whether
we hurt. And what is symmetry anyway but two things wanting, in all their possible differences, to be exactly
the same? I tell you Tuesdays are long because they are long in this deciding. And red, so you’d have something
to look at while I think this through: how to know if we are these two, tightly wound things, or just a wound plus a wound?

When I recall myself reading and rereading The Opposite of Light, I think back to that line in “Somehow, We Are A We”: “Your loveliness is measured
 / by the number of poor things you’ve dazzled.” I’m one of those poor things, dazzled.

Mar 25, 2016

The Opposite of Light

The Opposite of Light is here!

TheOppositeofLight

If you’d like to review The Opposite of Light, let me know and I will get you a review copy! If you plan on teaching The Opposite of Light, I am more than happy to skype/visit your classes and answer questions or read to your students.

Upcoming Readings:

Spring Poets Supper @ Gardenias – Thursday April 21st
featuring Solmaz Sharif, Kimberly Grey, & D.A. Powell
1963 Sutter Street
San Francisco, California 94115 @ 6:00 PM
Tickets are available now here!
You get a delicious three course meal and complimentary wine along with the reading!

Stanford University – Tuesday May 10th
featuring Kimberly Grey and Rita Mae Reese
The Terrace Room (3rd Floor) of Margaret Jack Hall @ 6 PM

Green Apple Books – Thursday May 19th
featuring Kimberly Grey, Rachel Richardson, & Tess Taylor
1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, California 94122 @ 7:30 PM

 

Sep 26, 2015

The Opposite of Light is available for pre-order!

The Opposite of Light is now up for pre-order! It launches April 1, 2016 and will be available for purchase at the AWP conference in Los Angeles.

TheOppositeofLight

Pre-Order The Opposite of Light on Amazon

Pre-Order The Opposite of Light on Barnes and Noble

Jan 19, 2015

Book News!

I’m super excited to learn that my first book, The Opposite of Light, has been awarded the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and will be published by Persea Books in 2016. Thanks so much to Gabe Fried and everyone else who has supported my work!

Oct 13, 2014

Recent News

I was so excited to answer questions about my poem “We are Mostly Merciful” for the Fall 2014 issue of The Kenyon Review:

An excerpt:
“The hardest part about writing this poem was the hardest part of writing any poem, attempting to create, what Alice Fulton calls “an expatriate space.” She says, “From the mother tongue poets create a linguistic state that is both foreign and available to readers of the broader language in which it exists” and that this space is a “slightly skewed domain where things are freshly felt because they are freshly said.” I’m always trying to make language feel strange and new as I discover the interior of a poem.”

Read the rest of the interview here: KR Conversations-Kimberly Grey

And click here to read the poem: We are Mostly Merciful

My poem “A System of Holding” appeared in the Spring 2014 issue of jubilat

My poems “Consoling System” and “What’s Happening” appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of A Public Space

 

 

Dec 23, 2013

Recent News

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.