Available June 30, 2026

"Kelly Gray has done something truly remarkable here, balancing taut language with lush, generous descriptions that roil down the page. The result is a series of poems that remind me of flint scraping against steel, scorching your knuckles as the darkness peels back."

-Michael Meyerhofer, author of What to Do If You're Buried Alive. 

"This is a book to linger over in the early hours when you can’t sleep, because neither can Nyx, who is crawling among the trees and who is painting roadside murals and who is carving wax into the shape of a hand, “using one match to set each fingertip on fire.” Those fires, like this collection, dazzle the observer—a little danger, a little glow."

-Abbie Kiefer, author of Certain Shelter

Kelly Gray is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021), The Mating Calls//of the// Specter (Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, 2023), Our Sodden Bond (MAYDAY Chapbook Prize, 2025), and Dilapitatia (Moon Tide Press, 2025). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Ploughshares, AGNI, Boulevard, Salt Hill Journal, and ZYZZYVA, among other places. Gray lives with her family in a cabin in the woods and in addition to her four other jobs, she teaches poetry in rural public schools.