Greater Grave

Greater Grave is a gorgeous collection that is simultaneously well-crafted and intuitive as well as equally cryptic and explicit. Jacq Greyja deftly unravels and retangles language bringing to question its ability to make sense of the material world. These poems stretch towards the impossibility of describing the ineffable remembering the forgotten and understanding the unfathomable with an effortlessness that is awe-inspiring. As someone who often struggles to reconcile the horror and beauty of embodiment I felt so heard and seen as I absorbed this work--i cannot know what i am Greyja writes but after reading this collection it is clear to me that they are at the very least a literary talent worth paying attention to. --Joshua Jennifer Espinoza Greater Grave documents late-stage capitalisms propensity for decay in relation to the body intimacy and memory. The discontinuities between bodily experience the rhetoric of self-empowerment and institutional notions of visibility drive the urgency behind these examinations. Fractured language emerges from confrontations with intergenerational pain ethnicity queerness disassociation and unbelonging. Greater Graves poetic account of a queer (non)corporeality questions the coded expected narrative of linear expansive growth--keeping in mind Anna Tsings writing on Life in Capitalist Ruins: Progress is embedded too in widely accepted assumptions about what it means to be human . . . The story of decline offers no leftovers no excess nothing that escapes progress. Progress still controls us even in tales of ruination.