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Small Gestures
“Melissa Wray’s Small Gestures is a masterpiece of short free verse forms,
beginning with gendered struggle involving
sexual harassment, and involving an arc of
struggles with the self and with others that
at times ends in madness, the nature of the
beast as it slouches toward its own humanity,
particularly charting one woman’s efforts to chart her own course. Wray is a free-verse Sappho; her book was 16 years in the making, leading at last to a mature vision of these powerful themes. The work is fearless, illuminating even in darkness, a worthy addition to the traditions of using “no word that doesn’t contribute to the presentation” while addressing themes that matter in human experience. “
—David Cope
“Melissa Wray’s Small Gestures frames a feminine worldview of constant sexual microaggressions, scarred and wounded bodies, relentless indignities, poverty and crushed dreams. Her poems present the wracked minutiae of raw observations moving through our streets and institutions. Wray’s ability to imprint and acknowledge the torment and pain of the inhuman human circus in which she herself descended is a blessed healing she delivers, not simply to herself, but to us all. Who among us has not watched over the perishing of loved ones, including parts of ourselves, to the grinding meat-wheel of lost hope and self-hatred that is the daily sustenance of addiction and the sound of dark subterranean rivers flooding these poems? And then, as if defying gravity and the laws of physics, in the broken mirror of Wray’s own post-beat sense of a Coltranesque love supreme, she cuts through her own despair as if ego was a mango pit left behind, and floods in a multigenerational illuminated space where no one need fear “losing you / to happiness.”
—Jim Cohn
beginning with gendered struggle involving
sexual harassment, and involving an arc of
struggles with the self and with others that
at times ends in madness, the nature of the
beast as it slouches toward its own humanity,
particularly charting one woman’s efforts to chart her own course. Wray is a free-verse Sappho; her book was 16 years in the making, leading at last to a mature vision of these powerful themes. The work is fearless, illuminating even in darkness, a worthy addition to the traditions of using “no word that doesn’t contribute to the presentation” while addressing themes that matter in human experience. “
—David Cope
“Melissa Wray’s Small Gestures frames a feminine worldview of constant sexual microaggressions, scarred and wounded bodies, relentless indignities, poverty and crushed dreams. Her poems present the wracked minutiae of raw observations moving through our streets and institutions. Wray’s ability to imprint and acknowledge the torment and pain of the inhuman human circus in which she herself descended is a blessed healing she delivers, not simply to herself, but to us all. Who among us has not watched over the perishing of loved ones, including parts of ourselves, to the grinding meat-wheel of lost hope and self-hatred that is the daily sustenance of addiction and the sound of dark subterranean rivers flooding these poems? And then, as if defying gravity and the laws of physics, in the broken mirror of Wray’s own post-beat sense of a Coltranesque love supreme, she cuts through her own despair as if ego was a mango pit left behind, and floods in a multigenerational illuminated space where no one need fear “losing you / to happiness.”
—Jim Cohn
101 pages, Paperback
Published April 16, 2022
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 10, 2023
Love, sex, addiction, recovery. Bodies aflame with promise and hope; souls singed by indifference and abuse. Wray, with precision wordplay, gives us a tour of one woman’s journey through damage and growth; through the vulgar and the erotic. Each poem is a captivating tableau, snapshots of existence that, like all great writing, expose the author’s ghosts. One is both repelled and aroused, angered and enlightened. In short, this book is a masterpiece of self-reflection and expiation.
Displaying 1 of 1 review