Greater Grave

"Greater Grave is a gorgeous collection that is simultaneously well-crafted and intuitive as well as equally cryptic and explicit. Jacq Greyja deftly unravels and retangles language, bringing to question its ability to make sense of the material world. These poems stretch towards the impossibility of describing the ineffable, remembering the forgotten, and understanding the unfathomable with an effortlessness that is awe-inspiring. As someone who often struggles to reconcile the horror and beauty of embodiment, I felt so heard and seen as I absorbed this work—'i cannot know what i am,' Greyja writes, but after reading this collection it is clear to me that they are, at the very least, a literary talent worth paying attention to." —Joshua Jennifer Espinoza



Greater Grave documents late-stage capitalism’s propensity for decay in relation to the body, intimacy, and memory. The discontinuities between bodily experience, the rhetoric of self-empowerment, and institutional notions of visibility drive the urgency behind these examinations. Fractured language emerges from confrontations with intergenerational pain, ethnicity, queerness, disassociation, and unbelonging. Greater Grave’s poetic account of a queer (non)corporeality questions the coded, expected narrative of linear, expansive “growth”—keeping in mind Anna Tsing’s writing on Life in Capitalist Ruins: “Progress is embedded, too, in widely accepted assumptions about what it means to be human . . . The story of decline offers no leftovers, no excess, nothing that escapes progress. Progress still controls us even in tales of ruination.”