David Cazden

Dilapitatia's physical size is 8.5" square. It won't disappear easily in a bookshelf with other  traditionally sized books, as if what's within isn't easily contained. And indeed, one finds many challenging and pusuasive poems, with both long lines and short lines, but always written with courage and intensity. 

There are longer sequential poems as well as 1-2 page poems. The reader isn't often led along neat narrative paths so much as immersed through layers of meaning, shuffling time and image and personal experience. Using startling yet delicate language, Gray effectively writes about the earth, the body, personal history, nature and transformation as if there were no boundaries between them, and crafted with a risky edge.

Dilapitatia begins with a list poem, a definition of Gray's own coined word as the title, and it summarizes Gray's vision and sets up the rest of the collection. The list begins:

Dilapitatia

Disorder Class: Obsessive

1. Recurrent and persistent thoughts about dilapidated structures and junctures

2. Finds it difficult or unable to control the need to be near dilapidated homes

...

b) Keeps Xanthoria and Lccaria amethystina, jarred.

c) Breaks glass windows to enter abandoned homes, only to undress in the roofless kitchen

d) Keeps pinhole camera, a crowbar, and a collection of wooden doorknobs in the trunk of car.

In the poems that follow, Gray deepens the themes of grief, loss, mortality and motherhood. I find a steady search for truth here, with many vivid details, and Gray's lines seem to leap directly from  experience. I sometimes sense fleeting glimpses of the unique Western American rural experience.  Such as in these excerpts from Gray's 10 part poem about childhood and coming of age, beautifully titled "In These Pipes, In This House, In This Field":

I wash my body with the bitter waters of fenceposts

and shotguns. Dead things are perfumed,

hung on barbwire. A skunk, a snake, a gingham dress

...

Still, the grandmother is a field. Windswept hair even when all the planet is still.

As she writes her thumbs fly in different directions to keep time

with her click-click-clicking of the typewriter.

...

There is a dead poet in my oven, the smell of yeast and agitation fills my house.

My floorboards are the colors of all the ways he left.

When boys fuck me I cum neatly crafted ballads and it hurts

because there are never stories with endings.

A few pages later, in "Delivery", Gray writes about giving birth, a recurring subject, written in the same layered style:

When my daughter was born,

I stitched the shape of her heart to my chest. Took her

in diners, nursed her in restrooms, left her father at a campsite.

She would fall asleep to the lullaby of engine...

And the memory of her own child's childhood in "Memory Abdomen":

I unwind the coiling of her stomach.

Stretch the places I have marked her

with the broke between my fingers, she is too young

to have this much worry. Sweet organ meat,

precipice of sour.

Throughout the book Gray returns to animals and one is tempted to find a kind of mythology, but there is only a personal vision. A fox, for example, makes appearances in more than one poem. Gray writes in "How the Fox Learns a Word":

I painted my fox-face with blood and chewed

through a couch that I had been told cost as much as a car.

In one of Gray's elegies, a complex poem in five parts, "The Problem I Am Having Is That Dying Can Be so Loud with Death so Quiet", the narrator transforms into a doe:

I grow a thousand teats, then, the fawns come. Each one I love,

each one has a neck shaped like the inside of a cougar's mouth.

In another elegy with owls and a buck,  "The Coldening", Gray begins with the lyrical lines:

The leaving was such that each apple

in the orchard glassed over into ghost form

on a single night. Centers rotted, dropped out,

only translucent orbs at the end of wooded knots remained.

I often feel that within the book's covers anything could happen, anything could be said. The atmosphere the poems create is electric, like being in a desert before a thunderstorm. Gray is both provocative and vulnerable In "Pretty In Pink":

I unfollow every account where women are perfect.

I can't scroll far enough down to get to a stopping point. I hide

this fact like a shining block of gold

I pulled from his mouth the last time he lied to me.

The sudden shifts are part of Gray's craft. The poet's juxtapositions give many poems their unpredictability. Gray writes in "I Come Offering Lamb", some lines which could almost be an Ars Poetica:

A curry of colors, mustard, dusted pinks, a violet

so muted it is made of flour and lilac. I once loved

being strangled. Patchworks of lichen lining my oak throat.

I can sing two songs, one a lullaby, one a murder ballad.

I adore and admire this beautifully printed and written  8.5" square book of vulnerable yet bold poems. I find many places in which to lose myself, always discovering something new, presented in ways I won't forget. This book is a poet's search. Reading it is an experience I highly recommend.