How to Paint the Savior Dead
Jason Gray
9781612777856
32 pages
The Kent State University Press
Overview
“Jason Gray’s How to Paint the Savior Dead rethinks the complex traditional connections among women’s bodies, spirituality, and art. Gray is not afraid of hard work, hard thought, and big vision just because the subject of his fascination has been both exalted and besmirched by tradition, both enriched and impoverished by the hands of our predecessors. Gray throws himself into the mix of muses, amore, and immortality with more—much more—than common wit, passion, and intelligence. As he separates out mortal beauty from immortal, he ignores, as one of his poems says, ‘what is heavenly for what is Heaven.’” — Andrew Hudgins“Jason Gray ends his sequence ‘Meditations of the Tomb Painters’ with the lines: ‘Here is my heart in paint, a stowaway / Inside the art that only God would see.’ And indeed, in all of Gray’s work there is a sense that the heart, the faithful and abiding heart, is best (and most safely) transported via the artifice of poetry. From the heart-wrenching, blank-verse ekphrastic ‘My Daughter as the Angel Gabriel . . .’ to the heartily clever nonce ‘You Put Your Right Hand In. . . ,’ this is work that is always worshipful of its medium.” — Kathy Fagan
Author Bio
Jason Gray is the author of Adam & Eve Go to the Zoo (2003) and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the creative writing program of The Ohio State University.
