Silver Box by Natachee Momaday Gray

Natachee Momaday Gray’s SILVER BOX is a marvel of narrative rendered whole by lyric. Each poem is seeded in the fertile earth of the body, and watered with an aesthetic so fierce and sensual that any reader will yearn to be the apprentice on the wheel as Momaday Gray flings her knives whetted on language and image toward the intoxicated reader. She is a gunslinger of sound, as accurate as Billy the Kid, who haunts these pages. She is a master of extended metaphor, which she draws as tightly as the umbilicus of life that anchors us to this fragile earth, and demands we acknowledge the beauties which mercifully bind us to each other.

–Gary Worth Moody, author of the poetry collections: THE BURNINGS, OCCOUQAN, and HAZARDS OF GRACE

They say nothing new is created, that everything is an adaptation.  But Silver Box by Natachee Momaday Gray is something new.  These are poems cut from the bones of a private religion by a gifted and perceptive poet.  These are “found teeth, found roses, strung with corn on the rosary”, an intoxicating amalgam of lyricism and language, metaphor and myth.

Momaday Gray ranges a nostalgic and living earth, from NOLA, Nevada and NYC to the house of a Hero-Bear-Grandfather, where rubicund blooms, where heaven is “of the dirt instead of clouds”.  These poems sing and smoke cigarettes, dance and weep.  They grow like common mallow in everyday places and die like Billy the Kid.

Like Honey Black perfume, Silver Box lingers with the sillage of promiscuous jazz and Santa Fe sacridity, cinema and sensuality.  Like the earth, these poems are alive and possessed with spirit.  Like her ancestors, Momaday Gray is a living manifestation of the transformative inseparability of art and life.

–Christopher Brooks, author of the poetry collections With Them I Move and Lapis Moon

Review: https://www.sfreporter.com/arts/