Kelly Gray is a writer, educator, mother, and in some distant past, a raptor handler and spectrum birth worker. Her debut poetry collection, Instructions for an Animal Body, was published in 2021 by Moon Tide Press.
These evocative poems, engaging with the natural world, are grounded by the violence of humanity — fires, the pandemic, school shooters, to name a few. Our human violence, often the focus in a work like this, exists just off-stage.
Instead, Gray communes with animals and crafts an outline for motherhood informed by whales. By intersecting these obsessions — animals and birth — Gray reminds us that we “belong to land” and not the other way around.
In an email interview, Kelly and I discussed the relationship between the poet and the natural world in late-stage capitalism.
Shelby Pinkham: My introduction to your poetry was the February 2021 issue of deathcap, a literary journal based in Ontario, Canada. Today, I’m thinking about one of your poems from this issue, “Origami Snowflake Winter Prayer.” These lines in particular:
breast milk full, my bone breath made to cradle.
She was part whale, water, moon.
Stunning! And in such intimate conversation with your books.
Some focal points of your poetry are birth, renewal, and death. I’m curious: Are these poems, "Origami Snowflake Winter Prayer,” “Drive By,” and “Futureless, Past Busted,” pre- or post- Animal Body?
Kelly Gray: Birth and death take up a lot of space within my life. Birthing my child was like experiencing a massive self-death, and a messy rebirth of self. Birthing was the most un-precious thing I have ever done, so I began teaching childbirth education in hopes that I could help destigmatize our fear of death while talking about birth. As a parent, that’s my job, be fearful of death and make sure my child doesn’t die. How do I navigate the world with that as my backdrop?
I wrote the deathcap poems around the time I wrote most of Animal Body, in 2019-2020. The driving force of Animal Body is a meditation on my own death, rebirth, and my own capacity for violence and love.
Pinkham: On your website, you mention this birth work, as well as working with birds of prey. You’ve lived so many lives. How do these experiences inform your poetry?
Gray: Each of these experiences came with its own language. From anatomy to slang or Latin and Greek etymology, the layers of cultural appropriation and horror, each of these experiences creates vast languages that are always informing me, on a word and line level.
The commonality between these experiences is that I am comfortable with discomfort. Discomfort allows us to grow and root within community.
Pinkham: You mentioned bodies of language. I wanted to ask you about your seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of birds, whales, and other animals. Is that poetic research, or is that coming from pre-established knowledge?
Gray: It is a mix. When I become interested in a topic, I gather information, and the act of writing allows me to know it as a part of myself. Right now, I am writing about glaciers. I am looking at them through video, articles, and paintings. Unfortunately, information processing can sometimes feel internally frantic because I have close to zero memory power, so no matter how much I read, it doesn’t usually stick.
But! I think my work with birth and with birds is different, because I was engaged in real time and it touched all my senses. I know what birth smells like, the sounds people make, the pauses. Those are details I couldn’t find through research. I had to observe and reflect on what the observations moved within me.
Pinkham: I never hear other poets say this. I, too, have so little bandwidth for retaining information. How do you collect and organize research, then? What is your process?
Gray: That is heartening to hear, and I suppose makes sense. So many of us are interested in catching the most fleeting of moments.
Writing poetry is how I organize the research, and all of it happens very quickly. While I was writing “My Grandmother is an Orca,” I was learning that orca culture is matrilineal and that each clan learns distinct behaviors. The more I read about orcas, the more I begin to see a reflection of myself and my family, especially learning that their cultural codes limit their adaptability.
There is a clan in deep decline because they only eat Chinook salmon, but won’t eat Sockeye salmon. Since, Chinook populations have plummeted, and this orca clan has too. … As I am reading, the orca becomes embedded in my own personal narrative. I am weaving my own experiences with the whales.
Pinkham: I’m also curious to hear more about what’s drawing you to glaciers. How did that obsession form and where do you see that taking you?
Gray: The glacier kick started esthetically, through old photographs and paintings, like the paintings of Frederic Edwin Church. They are beautiful to look at, but have a dark colonial history. That sent me into glacier formation, and I don’t want to give too much away, because my first piece on them is forthcoming from Passages North. Then, as often the case is, the grief came, which propels me.
You can’t think about glaciers without thinking about climate change. So that is where I am at, writing to the visual, evoking the grief, writing about glaciers, but really writing about late-stage capitalism.
Pinkham: I feel like this is some of the most important work that poetry takes on: rejecting capitalism, exposing the many devastations of late-stage capitalism, and unearthing the specific ways humans live and grow outside of these structures.
Animal Body and also your audio chapbook, My Fingers are Whales, both concern themselves with late-stage capitalism, too. Is that fair to say?
Gray: Regarding the role of the poet, I agree wholeheartedly: REJECT IT ALL!
I believe “the personal is political” is alive and well in my work. As a survivor of violence and institutionalization, I want to explore my own complicity and violence that perpetuates harm, while using the discomfort of the exploration as a place to grow. But as a poet who is cultivating a relationship with my reader, I don’t want to be overt about it.
I am most effective when I am writing about the mundane happenings of life and leaving out blunt connections to larger themes of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. I don’t need to tell you that capitalism is draining your life force, you already know this.
If I can line up visuals that allow you to connect to your grief, your anger, and imagine an alternative life force, while allowing you your own autonomy in thought, that feels far more consensual than me telling you what you should see, feel, do.
Pinkham: I appreciate how gentle you are with your reader, these notions of consensual subversions and autonomous investigations.
One poem I’d be interested in discussing is “Crack Me Electric.” You write:
This is how I learn to start fires, me looking up at the beasts who
birthed me.
The refrain, “This is how I __________” in this poem feels so compelling. Can you tell me about it?
Gray: “Crack Me Electric” is about meeting my symptoms of PTSD head on. I wrote it in hopes that it would feel as electric as PTSD feels while still conveying a sense of self-soothing. It took a lot for me to say I can take up space as a wounded pure-hearted monster.
At the time I wrote it — during the dry lightning storms that caught my region on fire in 2020 — the poem served as my personal manifesto, or my lullaby, a map of how I would need to walk in this world. The repetition of “This is how I __________” is exactly what I needed to hear, and so I wrote it until I knew it.
Pinkham: The list poems in Animal Body and in My Fingers are Whales seem, likewise, to be offering space for healing. About the final poem that catalogs 25 desires in the pandemic — I’m curious about this formal choice. Why engage with your grief and longing through the list poem?
Gray: I was suspicious of the list poems at first, partially because they are very fun for me to write. Internally, I am feeling overwhelmed. The numbering allows me to go one number at a time and the rhythm of this practice calms me. Externally, I rely on the numbering to slow the reader down while also building suspense. I know the reader has a familiarity with numbers.
Each sorrow builds upon the last, a cumulative effect, and we always feel like we are at the climax — but nope, we can keep going. If we love hard our capacity for grief is infinite. What better way to show that than with numbers?
And really, isn’t that how a lifetime of grief works?
Kelly Gray (she/her/hers) is a writer and educator in Northern California on Coast Miwok land, deep in fire country. She is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press) and the audio chapbook My Fingers are Whales (Moonchild Press). Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, Pithead Chapel, Hobart, Under a Warm Green Linden, The Normal School, Barren Magazine, The Inflectionist, Lunch Ticket, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Instagram: @_west_of_west
Shelby Pinkham (she/they) is a queer Chicanx poet from Bakersfield, California. They are currently an editor for Rabid Oak journal and a third-year MFA poetry candidate at California State University, Fresno. Their work can be found in PANK, Poetry Online, Honey Literary, and Neon Door. Instagram: @pinkhamshelby