Ray brings back my love of poetry, she throws it into an empty room and it proliferates, sometimes frighteningly, until it’s half way down my throat and I only want more. A once in a life time author will cause you to become obsessive, you’ll never truly get enough, and you’ll forget your other lovers. That’s how I feel upon reading Ray’s work and I am certain of one thing, she’s only going to keep surprising us, because despite everything, she lives for her art, and it shows, in the sheer force of her will to write it out, and touch us with her fire. She alone can create a cage, set a stage for madness, tattoo a feeling, gut an emotion or twist my psyche with an uncanny awareness of what makes us tick. If we know everything then the only thing left is what we make of the fall out, and Ray is the mistress of revealing what lies beneath us.
-Candice Louisa Daquin, Pinch the Lock
In ‘The Myths Of Girlhood’, Christine Ray has pulled her voice and her strength from her debut collection, ‘Composition of a Woman’ and she has pushed the status quo once again, writing hard truths into beautiful lines, she has asked you to make a choice: should you stay and placate society, leave your young girls to fend for themselves, throw them to the wolves or bring them, guilt and strength, wearing the pride of their mothers into this time.
‘The Myths Of Girlhood’ lays out the lies we have fed to our daughters, the pain we have all had to swallow, and the promises we have yet to fulfill. But with this work Christine Ray is paving the way for us all, showing us how to shed the shame and the vulnerability that we have worn for far too long.
-Nicole Lyons, Blossom and Bone
Through her use of strong, stark imagery we look in the mirror with the poet and face ourselves and all the monsters who maimed, the demons we’ve survived, and the dragon who longs to burst out of her self-actualized breast to embrace her freedom.
Ray’s elegant poetry tells us 3D stories of a real woman’s life. We root for our hero as she tears off layers. Grows into herself. Names herself; poet, boss, lover, mother, SURVIVOR and with a small, two-word line as loud as a thunder-clap, “my own.”
-Rachael Ikins, Just Two Girls
