Praise for Science Before Fiction
“Maria Gray is a poet whose lines forge that ever-so-rare balance between ferocity and tender grace, often in the same breath. Shifting effortlessly between the profane and profound, heartbreak and irrevocable joy, the voice here seems the sum total of our times, distilled into an architecture so surefooted, so capacious, it is hard to imagine that she's only getting started. We’ll be hearing from this poet, thank god, for many years to come.”
Ocean Vuong
“‘I got so good at lying / down,’ Maria Gray writes in this tough and haunting chapbook. Gray's poems are passionate and astute in their examination of sexual violence, illness and loss, abandonment and survival. They reflect on what is real and what is constructed, taking us in and out of medical offices, simulation games, sites of collective outcry. Science Before Fiction is a worthy contribution from a complex new voice.”
Natalie Shapero
In Science Before Fiction, Maria Gray complicates standard narratives of grief and survivorship, asking how to rebuild a life in a body beholden to its past. Reaching beyond the binary of recovery and death, Science Before Fiction chronicles a period of prolonged neuroimmune illness triggered by sexual violence. Gray’s speaker struggles to make sense of what it means to exist in the shadow of such violence, often finding herself in conversation with her dead. Borrowing text from intake assessments, long-term nuclear waste warning messages, and contemporary algospeak, the poems orbit the nucleus of apocalypse—personal, social, cultural. With contemporary influences spanning The Sims to Diane Seuss, Maria Gray offers a formally innovative, surreal reflection on illness, loss, and the pursuit of control where there is none. Defiant but not without hope, Science Before Fiction is a sharp, honest lyric that attempts to make sense of the senseless.
ISBN: 979-8994811269