Documents

Jan-Henry Gray was born in Quezon City, Philippines, and moved to California with his family when he was six years old. He lived undocumented in the U.S. for more than 32 years. He received his BA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and his MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. He is the recipient of the inaugural Undocupoets Fellowship, the 2014 Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Arts Award, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute Fellowship, and the 2016 Lannan Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Poetry Foundation, Poets.org, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Fourteen Hills, New City, Puerto del Sol, Southern Humanities Review, Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and other journals. He lives in Chicago with his husband where he writes and co-hosts events featuring writers, performers, artists, and musicians. D. A. Powell is the author of five collections of poetry, including Chronic, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Repast: Tea,Lunch, and Cocktails. Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.

“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“Jan-Henry Gray is a remarkable poet. His work makes visible the emotional and intellectual chaos of living as an undocumented queer man. His lyrical testimony fuses anxiety and yearning into an archive of familial history and self-discovery. His poems will help increase the visibility of those made invisible by our society. Gray is a resourceful poet. He transforms legal forms and interview questions into texts that reveal the dehumanizing power of language. Gray is a skeptical poet. Rightfully, he loathes borders and binaries, but he’s also aware of the limits of poetry. ‘Freedom from forms,’ writes Gray in a lyric essay near the end of Documents, which is ‘queer, dense, full of strange currents.’ The essay beautifully reminds us to always seek freedom from all kinds of constraints on our living and our thinking.” —Eduardo C. Corral“‘How do you weigh an ocean?’ Jan-Henry Gray asks while contemplating the distance between the United States and the Philippines, from where the author immigrated without documents. In this imagistically adventurous, formally experimental, and emotionally acute debut poetry collection, Gray weighs the distance from one location to the next. The brilliance of Documents rests within its ability to remind us that poetry is everywhere, from how ‘we breathe and cloud the windows’ to how ‘I lift my palms upwards, as if to say: Let us sing a song made up of a single word.’ I am so thankful for this book and how important it is for the literary world, especially the growing canon of migrant literary activists!” —Christopher Soto“‘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. Finely rendering emotional complexities and specific details of lives taken for granted or outright ignored, Gray's poems are documents of human souls aspiring to José Garcia Villa's aphorism and assertion, ‘have come, am here.’” —Barbara Jane Reyes