Good Grief, the Ground
Description
Margaret Ray is pulling back the curtains on our societal performance of culture, guiding an exposing light to the daily performance that is life in a woman's body.
Selected by Stephanie Burt as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Ray's Good Grief, the Ground interrogates the everyday violences nonchalantly inflicted unto women through personal, political, and national lenses. Moving between adolescence and adulthood, Ray alternates between dark humor and heart-wrenching honesty to explore grief, anxiety, queer longing, girlhood, escape from an abusive relationship, and the dangers of lending language to a thing. With stunning wit and precision and attention, we see Ray show us what it is to be human: the mess of tenderness and darkness and animosity.
Out of the heavy Florida dusk, out of peach juice and late-night swimming pool break-ins and glances across grocery store aisles come these completely captivating poems. In the words of Stephanie Burt: ?Come and see. Take care. Dive in.?
More details
Person
Margaret Ray grew up in Gainesville, Florida and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. A winner of the Third Coast Poetry Prize and a Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America for her chapbook Superstitions of the Mid-Atlantic, her poems have appeared in Narrative, The Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in New Jersey.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- The End of August
- Haunt
- Making Out at the Movies
- Hail Mary
- Expulsion Lessons but Replace the Garden with a Swamp
- Tourist
- A Collection of Dangerous Things Interspersed with Things Occasionally Fine or Good
- Freezing the Meat
- The View from Here
- Getting Your Period at the Water Park
- Quick-Change at the Lady 'Canes
- While Wandering in Montreal, I Mistake Desire for that Feeling You Get When You Actually Want to Be Another Person
- My Younger Self Speaks to Me and I Write Down What She Says
- Wanda is a Particle Physicist
- Star Witness
- Enough
- Substance and Accident
- Dead Ringer
- [Once when we were walking, winter,]
- Fuck, Marry, Bury: Loneliness, Solitude, Isolation
- Reader, I Married Him
- ShamWow
- Something that Floats
- Superstitions of the Mid-Atlantic
- Show/Tell
- Divorced Invertebrate
- Eve Signs the Papers
- Wanda Vibing
- My Younger Self Speaks to Me and I Write Down What She Says
- Still Life
- If a Lion Could Speak, We Couldn't Understand Him
- Late & Soon
- Gig Economy
- The Problem of Where to Put Things
- Taxonomy
- Request for Repair
- Disaster A/version / Re/vision
- Grief is a Sudden Room
- Transmission Received from Penelope in Deep Space
- Memory Palace
- Wanda in the World
- After
- Archimedes, Get out of the Tub
- Peaches
- Along for the Ride
- First, and Then, and Then
- The Clearing
- At the Tolstoy Museum We Sat and Wept
- Civilization VI
- Fuck, Marry, Bury: Speaker, Poem, Poet
- Garden State
- At a Distance
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Colophon
