Grey All Over

Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021) is a multimodal, autoconceptual study of the life and death of my white, working-class father as well as of the lives and deaths of some of my own inherited violences and values. Built out of a variety of materials—by turns poetic, photographic, transcriptive, procedural, epistolary, and scholarly in form—the book is a record of my struggle to reconcile both unconditional love with necessary critique and the critical-experiential lens of class with those of gender and race. I also understand this project as the personal-political-spiritual-aesthetic distillate of my doctoral dissertation, which looked at competing definitions and embodiments of “seriousness” and eventually unfolded as a deconstruction of whiteness in the space of contemporary poetry.

Some keywords: trauma and grief, addiction and mental health, aliens and angels and perhaps more immediate/social figurations of otherness, valorizations of ambiguity and failure, contemporary poetry (state of)

About to leave Toronto for Edmonton, September 1997
An email I sent my dad from Providence, RI, a few years after he’d died