Selected by Stephanie Burt as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Good Grief, the Ground interrogates the everyday violences nonchalantly inflicted onto 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 the roles the world offers us, and the dangers of lending language to a thing. With stunning wit and precision and attention, Ray shows us what it is to be human: the mess of tenderness and darkness and animosity.
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.
Margaret Ray will be in conversation with author and poet Peter Conners, Publisher and Executive Director of BOA Editions.
