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How to Paint the Savior Dead Wick
Poetry Chapbook Series Four, #1
courtesy of our partner, Atlas
Books |
“Jason Gray’s How to Paint the Savior Dead rethinks
the complex traditional connections among women’s bodies, spirituality,
and art. Gray is not afraid of hard work, hard thought, and big vision just
because the subject of his fascination has been both exalted and besmirched
by tradition, both enriched and impoverished by the hands of our predecessors.
Gray throws himself into the mix of muses, amore, and immortality with more—much
more—than common wit, passion, and intelligence. As he separates out
mortal beauty from immortal, he ignores, as one of his poems says, ‘what
is heavenly for what is Heaven.’”
— Andrew Hudgins
“Jason Gray ends his sequence ‘Meditations
of the Tomb Painters’ with the lines: ‘Here is my heart in paint,
a stowaway / Inside the art that only God would see.’ And indeed, in
all of Gray’s work there is a sense that the heart, the faithful and
abiding heart, is best (and most safely) transported via the artifice of
poetry. From the heart-wrenching, blank-verse ekphrastic ‘My Daughter
as the Angel Gabriel . . .’ to the heartily clever nonce ‘You
Put Your Right Hand In. . . ,’ this is work that is always worshipful
of its medium.”
— Kathy Fagan
“The ekphrastic poems in How to Paint the Savior
Dead celebrate and enact the power of words to exhume a living body—a
human’s or a god’s—from the stilled depths of the painted
image. Jason Gray, a chiaroscurist drawn to the drama at the border between
light and dark, the seen and the hidden, and the sacred and the profane,
writes wisely, wryly, wonderfully, and, at times, wickedly about the ‘common
beauty’ of the quotidian and the ‘mundane miracle’ of
the divine.”
— Eric Pankey
Jason Gray is the author of Adam & Eve Go to the Zoo (2003) and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the creative writing program of The Ohio State University.
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