(guns & Butter)

Book excerpt: Poetry. Women's Studies. Concrete Poetry. "Combine Apollinaire with Pam Grier and you might come close to Montana Ray's ferocious debut, (GUNS & BUTTER). Each concrete poem is shaped like a gun and its poetic interiors are bracingly brutal and gorgeous. Capsuled in parentheticals, each magnetic phrase is locked and loaded as Ray burns holes into subjects ranging from interracial love, single motherhood, to America's unrelenting addiction to gun violence. Her voice is mesmerizing, tender, vicious, chimeric, as she veers between role-playing a warrior glock-wielding Annie Oakley to 'warm, new mother.' I love (GUNS & BUTTER) and cannot sing it enough praises. It's the kind of rare first collection that is startling, necessary, and is truly like no other book." Cathy Park Hong ..".honest, sparse writing that is brazen and piercing as a bullet." Publishers Weekly "With cohesive intelligence, not to mention pained hilarity, Ray recasts what is not only possible but endlessly delightful in Poetry." Cate Marvin "Is she getting off on this? It's uncomfortable to read." Joy Katz, American Poetry Review "This work reminds me that it's point of view that gives motherhood, violence, race, desire meaning beyond language. Nothing in things, except how held, by whom." Simone White"