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Magic Eye by Jonathan Molina-Garcia

Bio

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Jan-Henry Gray is the author of Documents (BOA Editions Ltd.), chosen by D.A. Powell as the winner of the Poulin Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Selected Emails (speCt! Books.) His writing can also be found in Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Margins, and other journals. Jan was born in the Philippines, grew up in California, and worked as a chef in San Francisco for more than 12 years. He lived undocumented in the US for more than 32 years. A graduate of San Francisco State University and Columbia College Chicago’s MFA program, he received the inaugural Undocupoets Fellowship and awards from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. A Kundiman fellow, he currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Adelphi University where he is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program.

Bio

Book

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Documents opens every closet and drawer and says: ‘search me.’ It says ‘[hide History].’

It is a full disclosure and a redaction, a history and its endless revisions.” —D.A. Powell

Book

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“‘The Philippines is ghost-country,’ writes Jan-Henry Gray, in this gorgeous debut collection, and indeed, Gray's speakers can be thought of as ghostly, muted and aching for connection, in the specifics of place, in language, in poetry. These are poems of thwarted belonging, and the emotional consequences of institutional and social invisibility.”

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"The brilliance of Documents rests within its ability to remind us that poetry is everywhere…I am so thankful for this book and how important it is for the literary world, especially the growing canon of migrant literary activists!”

“His work makes visible the emotional and intellectual chaos of living as an undocumented queer man...His poems will help increase the visibility of those made invisible by our society...He transforms legal forms and interview questions into texts that reveal the dehumanizing power of language. 

Eduardo C. Corral

Barbara Jane Reyes

Christopher Soto

Writing

Publications

POETRY

CHAPBOOK

Selected Emails

(speCt! Books)

a chapbook in unwitting collaboration with Chris Philpot

OTHER 

MEDIA

River Capture” (2021)

Image and Text: Jan-Henry Gray

Editing: Jonathan Molina-Garcia

 

Part of The Poetry Project’s 47th Annual New Year's Day Marathon

12/31/20-1/1/2021

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Press

Press

Kenyon Review
Review

by Anni Liu

"There was a part of me that opened this book hoping to find some part of myself or own experiences in it—the frisson of recognition is so compelling. But the actual intimate presence of another consciousness is an even more urgent encounter and one that I rarely find outside the realm of art."

Kenyon Review
Interview

Poetry Today #5: Visibility and Poeisis Edited by Ruben Quesada.

Poetry Today is a series dedicated to learning about the characteristics of poets and poetry from writers who have published a collection of poetry, full-length or chapbook, within the year.

RHINO Reviews
Review

by Luisa A. Igloria

"With the breath of 10,000 horses, with hawkers of cassava cakes, with sleepers in siesta hours and hoarders of palm sugar, he knows the only true archive of our humanity is in the moments we press the ungovernable details of our existence more sharply against questions meant to erase or level them out."

Bustle

Recommendation 

Documents is listed as one of 26 New Poetry Collections By LGBTQIA+ Writers To Look Out For In 2019.

Rebellious Magazine

Interview

with Jera Brown

"Three Poets of Color on How Their Books Came to Be." With poets mai c. doan and Xandria Phillips​.

Poets & Writers

Recommendation 

Documents is included in Page One,  as one of a dozen new and noteworthy books.

Poets & Writers

Featured

The short film Reverse Engineering is featured in Poets & Writers Theater.

The Academy of American Poets

Review

by Laura Eve Engel

Meta- cognitive and openhearted, this book offers itself as a kind of instruction manual for how one might identify structures in writing and in the world that are designed to limit access, rather than grant it—as well as how one might resist and reinvent them."

Newcity Lit

Review

by Jarrett Neal

Within “Documents,” the debut collection by local poet Jan-Henry Gray, the plight of the undocumented gains voice and agency, as poem after poem moves readers through the love, loss and labor of a population whose survival, sadly, relies on invisibility and impermanence."

Publishers Weekly

Review 

“The only way to know a song is to sing it,’ Gray writes, an apt piece of wisdom for a coming-of-age story in poems that twists through states and decades, immigration processes, chorus-like poems exploring bodies of water and extended family drama.”

barbarajanereyes.com

Recommendation 

Who I’m Reading Right Now: Marianne Chan and Jan-Henry Gray

“You know, I first read Gray’s poem, “Acknowledgments” a few years ago…My response to the poem was more like multiple responses, starting with a simultaneous exhilaration and revulsion, which made me come back to the poem again and again. I was like, dang, this child is talking SHIT…"

Book Riot

Recommendation 

Documents is listed as "3 Books I Can’t Wait For in 2019"

"Not only was his story compelling, but his writing was masterful. He could write these sharp sentences that even after I had forgotten the exact wording, I would remember the feel of them for days afterward."

Association of Asian American Studies

Interview

with Kawika Guillermo for the New Books in Asian American Studies Podcast 

A four-part series featuring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2021 Book Awards for the Association of Asian American Studies

Singapore Unbound

Review

by Sean Chua for Singapore Unbound

"Through its collection of experimental forms, memories, refrains, and encounters, Documents bears witness to the messy work of migration and adaptation, its processes of dislocation and disorientation, and the everyday negotiations one takes to survive it."

Contact

Contact

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© 2019 by Jan-Henry Gray                                                                                              Cover image: Magic Eye, Jonathan Molina-Garcia
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