“Gray’s work carries with it an anointing, and yet burdensome task of being an outspoken observer of life, sex, death, and all the in-betweens. Their voice promises and delivers the unexpected tradition of creative performance, which is incomparably brave and generous of a body that is in literal bloom. I find Gray’s poetry to carry the potential solutions many writers, whether in or outside of the LGBTQIA community, so intrinsically thirst after – solutions for being benevolent after discovery, heartbreak, grief, solutions for becoming and unbecoming. All of these solutions weave a voice unapologetic, because who really needs to harvest fire? Their credibility on the subjects are buried in the bones, catalyzing them beyond expert and deeming them more so, as an immortal agent of political and cultural change, these are words that survive, as they have survived, poems that don’t die, as Virgina Woolf stated, ‘for great poets do not die.’ Gray confirms in their work that poetry is still being defined in climate, spirit, and time – there are endless moments in their writing where it becomes devotional prayer, a confessionalist revival begging the reader to go deeper inside themselves to rest, reset, remember… I am moved to always sit, as I am sitting now, while reading Gray’s work. This writing, often reminding me of Baldwin… or Vuong… both writers without restriction between poetry and creative non-fiction, is what we need to ponder and nestle in our laps, it is work that teaches without the notion of feeling like you are being taught, a sermonous voice crying out to be heard in the noise.”