Happy that my review of the recent book out by A. E. Stallings, This Afterlife: Selected Poems, hit The Georgia Review. When I think of rhyme, I think of Stallings. Here’s a little excerpt:
There is something about her poems that unhurries us, that announces the pleasure of rhyme and skillful form. How fitting for a poet committed to chronicling what was lost (or what mistaken, or what version underappreciated) to revisit her catalog with new wonder, bald curiosity for what she’s accomplished. We discover there a land of reclamation, misapprehended myth and monsters, the enchantments of childhood, and women who deserved a fairer shake under the lights.
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Very honored to learn the National Endowment for the Arts named me a 2023 NEA fellow.
Personal Statement
If you are reading this, you likely have given some of your life to the belief that poetry is worth the climb. I have lived in at least ten states, two countries, and pursued three graduate degrees believing in poetry. I grew up in rural communities where resources are a consistent barrier. I wrote poems anyway. Now, I write, and I teach, and I like to go hiking. Scaling an actual mountain, hiking up the ribbon path to a rocky ledge and looking out, legs shaking, at the distance filled with light and shadow—you realize, of course, it’s true. It is worth it. Moments like this one offer us vistas beyond belief. New poems arrive. But it can be a slow process, that unending apprenticeship, this climb.
Such an investment on the part of the National Endowment for the Arts feels like a dare to keep going. I am deeply grateful to see more of the path ahead because of it. This fellowship will allow me to significantly shorten the time and personal resources it would have taken to finish current projects, thus giving me hope that more of these poems and essays will be out in the world soon, showing me what to write next.
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Very grateful to J. P. Dancing Bear for featuring my poem “In My Dream, Turing Shows Me His Greatest Machine” over at Verse Daily, the poem that ends No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man.
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What welcome news! I’ll be completing an artist residency at the Arteles Creative Center in Finland this summer. My bags are already packed for a month of intensive writing. I’ll be revising a new manuscript of poems and that verse play I keep threatening everyone with …
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Got to chat with poet Kevin Latimer about some of the themes of No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man. I’m certainly still, as I say in the interview, “having to think through the mist and the mystery of the no answer.”
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No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man found itself on Breaking Form’s “What Got Us Through” episode. It’s very moving to hear that these poems did that for someone else. What a delightfully queer poetry podcast from James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith.
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What a gift to discover that the book found readers even before its October launch.
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Very grateful to David Woo for this gorgeous review for Harriet.
“Although many of these poems are about his upbringing in the South and Midwest, Wray invokes a wider culture, queered and personalized, to undo the coercive silencing of otherness and childhood abuse, finding his exemplars in the great moral stylists of poetry, from Dante and Donne to Luis Cernuda, a precursor of queer sensibility. The result is eloquent work in which silence is not an evasion of suffering but instead foregrounds the experience of it, creating a space for beauty to sing “in the center of great incomprehension.”
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The kind folks at WORD Bookstores in Brooklyn invited me to read a love poem.
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C.E. Janecek gets a lot right in this generous consideration of No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man over at Colorado Review. I’m particularly fond of the phrase: “…seducing the reader with small details…”
Even more incisively: “No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man hinges on ‘being seen and seeing,’ on interpellation and the power of naming queerness—recognizing it in both history and oneself. Being perceived as a gay man becomes pivotal in the collection, to be perceived meant Alan Turing’s eventual death, but one cannot have intimacy or community or history without being perceived. To be seen is an act of resistance and the relief of being recognized.”
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The ARCs for this beauty just arrived. Book design by Amy Freels.
Shoot me a note if you would like a desk copy for review or if you would like to schedule an event, workshop, or class visit!
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Much appreciation to Sam Campbell and The Arkansas International for this thoughtful interview, in which I quote my mother, offer advice about banking (kind of) and a sneak peek at my next project about painter Keith Vaughan and hyraxes.