Kate Gray gives "every girl" what her rowing coach, and those she loves have given her: "how to trust the fullness/of four oars pulling as one." Coming from the silence of her childhood, Gray has "made it here, made it/here, lived to see/today." As she says to writers and readers in "Manifesto for the Girl," "Cut, saw, use the serration of stories, those/the outlaws tell...Find your edge. Wreck/the story erected around you." I am in awe of these poems of praise and compassion, and their fierce and tender feminist wisdom. A must-have map for every girl. --Frances Payne Adler, Poet, Professor Emerita and Founder of the Creative Writing and Social Action Program at California State University, Monterey Bay
For Every Girl: New and Selected Poems is a powerful collection of poems from a necessary voice in our American letters. Kate Gray crafts a collection dissimilar to most new and selected books. These poems, from a life of writing, come together in an arc that pulls us like "a rope across her palm" into girlhood, adolescence into adulthood, where the illusions of family become broken and truth reigns. We love hard and deeply in this book--cousins, aunts, uncles, mother, lovers. And even in the deepest betrayals Ms. Gray makes us hold in one hand pain and in the other compassion, in one hand loss, in the other hope. Like Plath, Sexton, and McCarriston, Kate Gray pulls into the natural world, and with metaphoric artistry takes us to the core of our being, reconciling all that has hurt us and all that has been delivered to us in order to sing this woman's song, this human song of strength, endurance, and the beauty of being human. For Every Girl is a must read for our time. --Jeff Knorr, author of The Color of New Country
Kate Gray's For Every Girl is a love song to and celebration of the girl, the queer, the survivor in all of us. Here is a poet dedicated to bearing witness to the ways that we ache and fight to; find our voices in a world that teaches girls to grow "around [their] silence the way pine bark/folds barbed wire in its skin." For us girls, us queers and survivors, Gray's poems are a reminder of our power to "wreck/the story erected around [us]" and that we "do not have to curve/in service," to anyone. Here we find not only testimony to the resiliency of girls, but an invitation to delight in the pure pleasure of their joy as we listen to "two women laughing like tulips bursting." Step into these poems, and you step into a communion that will lighten the soul, not through penance or absolution, but through a simple assurance. "Listen to me," she says, "you are light," "you are vessel, wave, spectrum, umbilicus," "you are good," she says "you have always been good." --Brionne Janae, author of After Jubilee