Good Grief, the Ground

In this moving and wide-ranging debut, Ray weaves through adolescence with lush, haunting imagery to showcase the dark, sometimes funny, and often absurd work of growing older. “Who am I,” Ray writes, “to tell you what to do with your monsters?” These poems are expansive, full of intriguing tangents as they bear witness to what is hard to live through, and harder still to recollect on the page. Ray fills each poem with memorable details: a “confetti-print carpet,” “the smell of his saliva around my lips.” Her observations paint the real strangeness of being alive, where a friend “worried she was pregnant” and then “got eight rebounds” in a basketball game. Ray does not shy away from pointing out that life is peppered with such moments of absurd juxtaposition, and wonders frequently about the roles of pain and joy in life. “We leave a mess, don’t we,” she writes. The emotional range, striking imagery, and unflinching honesty make this a powerful book. (Apr.)