poetry
Writing
BOOKS
A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing: Essays
“In every page of this uncompromising, inventive book, Grey grabs hold of […] the devastation of the unrecognized, unloved, and thereby invaded child—and shakes it, dissects it, studies it, and offers it up. What we learn from these pages is the power of language—searing, ingenious language—to remake the self word-by-word, to ‘reassemble’ an ‘I’ in the present tense. If the unseen child threatens to disintegrate the writing woman substantiates herself in the ‘now/ now/ now’ of the infinite infinitive verb: to be.” —Julie Carr
Systems for the Future of Feeling: Poems
Open this book and enter poems that work like bullseyes. Note the book is wider than normal, because the poems are wide. Just like this painting, Grey manages poems that are systematic and natural. To read Grey is to watch narrative like a little toy choo-choo train go right off its tracks. You sense the maker watches the train go off with a little wink and giggle. I thought of David Trinidad’s masterful Plasticville, where pop culture is celebrated and subverts the personal. I thought of Louise Gluck’s masterpiece, The Village Life, where an entire village trumps autobiography. The voice of Grey offers an intriguing counterpoint just now. The work is sedulous, sassy and sound.”
—Spencer Reece in The American Poetry Review
“These poems break a marriage open and look at its complicated interior: sometimes rife with passion, sometimes loneliness and pain. There are birds everywhere—flying, fighting, dropping eggs, entering mouths. There’s sex, food, hunger, light. Uncertainty. Invention and reinvention. And while the language is deft and beautiful, the poems are rarely rooted anywhere, rarely held to a geographic place; they’re more at play in the vast interior landscape of the speaker’s thinking mind that alliterates, associates, plays with and contemplates how she’s existing in a modern marriage with all its ancient, human troubles.”
—Hillery Stone in The Tupelo Quarterly
INTERVIEWS
Poets & Writers: Ten Questions
Interview on A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
KR Conversations
An Interview with The Kenyon Review
Letting Hybridity Happen
An interview with Fugue Magazine
SELECT PUBLICATIONS
“Our Verb us Loved”
First Published in Gulf Coast
“Patterning,” and Filmic”
First Published in The Spectacle
multiple essay excerpts from A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
First published in The Rumpus
“Devastation” and “Derivation,” two essay excerpts from A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
First published in New England Review and then on Lit Hub
three essay excerpts from A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
First published in Adroit Journal
“Conjugation”: an essay excerpt from A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
First published in The Kenyon Review
From The Broken Mother Sonnets
First published as a feature in Plume
From The Broken Mother Sonnets
First published in On The Seawall
“Unsystem the System”
First published in Narrative Magazine
“Wound! Out from Behind Two Crouching Masses of the World the Word Leapt”
First published in The Southern Review and now at Poetry Society of America
“We are Mostly Merciful”
First published in The Kenyon Review
“A System of Holding”
First published in jubilat and on Verse Daily
“A Difficult System”
First Published in The Collapsar
“How We Take Our Grief”
First published in Blackbird
“The First Marriage”
First published by Boston Review
“System of Rhetoric” and “System of Reason”
First published in The Paris-American
“Consoling System” and “What’s Happening”
First published in A Public Space
“System of After”
First Published in The Harlequin
“Somehow, We are a We”
First published in The Southern Review and on Verse Daily
“X and Y”
First published in TriQuarterly
