Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife

By Kelly Gray and Holly L'Oiseau

Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife is a folk told memoir of fragments and flashes that create a cohesive narrative. Each story is true, in the way folk stories are true. Mostly, they are highly speculative short stories, some flash, and a few poems, woven together with a balance of experimentation and more traditional syntax around them

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quarter Press
• Release date: Jan 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781952730085

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Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife

a folk-told memoir

by Kelly Gray

Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife

Text Copyright © 2023 by Kelly Gray

Art Copyright © 2023 by Holly L’Oiseau

No part of this book may be used or reproduced without the permission of the publisher and copyright owner. However, small portions may be referenced for academic or review purposes.

Also, no part of this book is true. It is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Editor: Chris Smith

Book Design / Layout: Chris Smith

Cover Art: Holly L’Oiseau

Fonts:

Interior Text is various forms of

Book Antiqua.

Title and Interludes are Bell MT.

ISBN: 978-1-952730-08-5

e-Book Edition

Published by Quarter Press, LLC

Millen, GA

www.quarterpress.com

Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife

a folk-told memoir

by Kelly Gray

Illustrations by Holly L’Oiseau

Quarter Press

Millen, GA

Words from Others

In Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife writer Kelly Gray makes the universe edible. Filled with bodies and images that never cease to bloom, this collection gave me a chorus to sing with when the world seems like it’s ending. With lines that spill like intimate prophecies, these poems invite us to dance with our animal selves and question the role of gender in the stories we tell about the world. Through forms that stretch and fold, this collection weaves fabulist ancestries--leading the reader on a delightful and healing escapade through galaxy-corridors of inheritance. Speakers call out into the wild conjuring kinship and crafting pathways home. Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife leaves us all, as Gray writes, Hungry. / Snapping./ Blooming.

~Robin Gow, author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy and

A Million Quiet Revolutions

In the dreamy landscape of Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife, everything is fully, if wrongly, embodied. In one fable, the coyote pup suckles at the tentacles of her octopus mother and carries her kitten brother in her mouth. In another, a grieving mother becomes a fox digging up and devouring her lost child. These are dark fairytales, filled with longing and wandering and violence. With seductive imagery and bewitching language, Kelly Gray invites us deeper into a world where every mouth conceals both tender licking tongue and terrible gnashing teeth.

~Liz Kay, author of Monsters: A Love Story and The Witch Tells

the Story and Makes it True: Poems

In Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife, Kelly Gray presents us with a discomfiting confluence of violence and lust, motherhood and solitude, the animal kingdom and the limits of the human experience. Here, an octopus gives birth to a coyote, then marries a snake who smell[s] like the inside of a rotting knot. Here, a human gestates a hive of writhing bees. Or a deer. Or, grieving her own child, becomes a fox whose belly squirms with kits. Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife presents a balance between poetic and prose forms, but never loses sight of its true strength: a sometimes-confessional style married to the speculative, grounded in the natural world where humans are lovers and instruments and mourners and monsters. Gray explores the sacrifices we make to honor our own worldbuilding, and her work is so believable we do not ask what’s real, but what we’re willing to truly look at. In Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife, Kelly Gray not only trusts our intelligence but wholly earns our suspension of disbelief.

~Katherine Fallon, author of DEMOTED PLANET and

The Toothmakers’ Daughters

Kelly Gray creates a world of animal body and female spirit that is witchy, sexual, sensual, and sensory. Gray blurs lines between narrative poetry and poetic prose while shifting forms around magical bodies and blooming fruit trees in the bloody, rural wild. Every line is its own poem. You could open this book up to any page and find poetic gold. A beautiful, emotional, vivid painting for the mind and heart.

~Raki Kopernik, author of The Things You Left and

The Memory House

Contents

a blessing...

Harvesting My Darling Dear

...1

Coyote Story

...3

A Window Overlooking the Wetlands

...17

How to Skin a Fox

...19

I am a Dead Wolf Talking to Boys

...32

Switchblade Serenade

...35

The History of Flowers that Eat Meat

...49

A Man, a Cleaver

...50

The Rat King

...53

The Strangling of the Swan

...57

Spindle Cells

...67

My Grandmother was an Orca

...68

Sleeping with Glaciers

...71

The Burden

...75

The History of Glaciers

...85

The Moth Teachings

...87

Ballad of Coastal Plains

...91

Sylvia

...92

Song of Wood

...105

For my family. Blood and chosen, human and otherwise.

-kg

A blessing for this book.

In writing this book, I offer marrow to the god of beetles. I offer whiskey to my grandfather. I offer my child the end of a lineage, severed. Pen, paper, sword. Sylvia, I see you. I offer seaweed to the trees, let me play bear and bring you scale and pink meat. I will collect the bodies of hummingbirds and feed them to the ghosts of stories not yet written, and the dead stories, too, I’m gunna feed you. I’ll wear a suit. I am that man, your man,