Song of Gray

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Winner of the 2025 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

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"Asha Futterman’s debut, Song of Gray, is a book of devastating insight and clarity, and introduces a vital new poet. America’s inexhaustible racism is one urgent muse: in sharp, staccato lyrics that leap easily back and forth across the lines of logic, Futterman maps “the abyss/ between nothingness and infinity,” an area of gray areas, where “a black name is often registered/ as little more than an encounter with power.” These poems drive toward a kind of offhand aphoristic wisdom, toward language so irreducible, it could only be the truth: “he died shoveling snow/ that melted the next day/ poetry makes/ nothing happen.” Again and again, Futterman arrives at a tense sort of wisdom—“there is no changing what is happening/ what is not happening”—which is to say, everything is something else and also nothing else. These are confusing, terrifying times: I want these remarkable poems for company."         
—Craig Morgan Teicher

 

Song of Gray approaches Black experience by clarifying the concrete worlds that exist between humanity and objecthood. Asha Futterman renders this in-between space as it reveals itself in performance: in a contemporary performance workshop, at an audition, in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in the dailiness of the YMCA, her porch, the walk to the train.

These poems build new logic systems. Futterman stands at her grandmother’s grave and proclaims, “how powerful how dense and naked how inaccurate.” With quiet, deadpan, and piercing language, Song of Gray offers earnest, felt relationships to race, empathy, pleasure, and nonsense. 

“There wasn’t a sunrise / just gray / then brighter gray.” In Song of Gray, blackness is not definite—it is an ambivalent hole as much as an area of hope. Blackness is a song of gray.