Second collection, Hollywood or Home, out now.

Included in the Sunday Times Poetry Books of the Year 2023 – ‘a subtle and surprising delight’.

Hollywood or Home shines a light on the filmic quality of daily life, reminding us just how thin the membrane between fiction and reality can be. Within its pages we encounter the Mind in various guises: as an invalid from the nineteenth century, a rain-streaked window-pane and (my favourite) a cabinet ‘populated by indescribable figurines’. Bristling with energy, humour and kick-ass bravura, at the same time these poems tremble with deeply felt emotion. —Julia Copus

Gray’s long-awaited second collection both celebrates and accuses the glamour
and imagination of the movies in particular, and of art in general. Whether it’s Meryl Streep or Ferris Bueller or John Cazale she’s writing of, Gray is illuminating, funny, and frequently moving. Underpinning the comedy and satire, though, is
a real pain at life’s jolts and time’s relentlessness: ‘What happened to the script?’—Nick Laird

Recent reviews in print and online:

Poets still tend to think their work should be tarted up with gewgaws from Greek myth or Anglo-Saxon. More boldly and more honestly, in Hollywood or Home (Seren, £9.99) Kathryn Gray references film and TV. Lines once uttered by Tom Cruise or Meryl Streep lead to reflections on ageing, the end of ambition and ‘the sweet spot of the sheer, bloody heart’: a subtle and surprising delight.

Graeme Richardson, Sunday Times Poetry Books of the Year

‘The mind is a terrible cabinet,/populated by indescribable figurines.’ Hollywood is one cabinet, with figurines of lost, abused actors, greedy moguls, and demagogic politicians. But the mind of the solitary poet, too, flails at its own evanescence: ‘I want to be a star. I'd die for my art. But I worry no one would care.’ Hollywood Or Home, its hymnal under-thrumming, demonstrates how Hollywood's eminence disfigures success. Gray's own ‘sack of regrets’ fashions a wondrous meditation on the vicissitudes of a life spent in art-making.

Oluwaseun S. Olayiwola, Poetry Book Society Bulletin

[P]erformative bravura pervades Kathryn Gray's Hollywood or Home, a collection written from the knowing-yet-tender midpoint of life where ‘no magic bat / outgames the sweet spot of the sheer, bloody heart.’ Hollywood or Home is an iterative read that builds upon itself, as good films might, creating its own self-aware, mirrored world of watching and being watched. In a beguiling mix of playfulness and sincerity, voices are refracted through the ruthless lens of Hollywood movies and La La land where the real is illusory and the illusory becomes real… Gray reaches behind set dressings to reveal darker and wilder truths, often using dramatic personae to striking effect. Jump-cut humour and surprising line-breaks delight…Hollywood or Home offers artful, thoughtful (and ultimately, joyful) comment on the cultures we live in and die for…

Sarah Westcott, Artemis

The Friday Poem
With unforgettable élan, Hollywood or Home captures both contemporary love/loathe obsessions and celebrity’s various aspects: a rollercoaster ride translated into poetry.—DA Prince

Trampoline
Smart, sophisticated, elegant: a dry martini of a book. Kathryn Gray makes the minor mighty.—Carla Sarett

London Grip
Gray’s point is always razor-sharp, and her verse is always entertaining… The title, Hollywood or Home, presents us with a choice. Can we live in the illusions of La La Land, or must we own up to the stark conditions of life? Can we do both? Think of Hollywood or Home as Variety on steroids – Heidegger’s Being and Time at the corner of Hollywood and Vine!—Charles Rammelkamp

The Lonely Crowd: Books of the Year
These are poems which sing with signs and wonders, with nostalgia and poetry – like Hollywood itself.—Jo Mazelis

Buzz Magazine
Gray by name but certainly not grey by nature, this colourful, clever, courageous collection is utterly captivating.—Mab Jones

Nation Cymru
Nearly twenty years since her first widely shortlisted collection, Kathryn Gray comes equipped with an evolved poetic dexterity as she presents an opus that is mottled with sharp wit and irony. In this Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year, the poet tenders a comprehensive study of human truth embedded in allusion to stardom and popular culture… This collection […] is a thing of binaries: of courage and diffidence, of desolation and humour, of bitter irony and genuine good faith… Through its frank humour, it denotes the black comedy of an iniquitous world with shrewd linguistic acumen: the lyrical embodiment of “if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry”… With stirring and surprising use of language, the writer discloses her guiding credence for these sixty-eight pages… In this mature and well-crafted sophomore collection, Kathryn Gray seeks to endure nonetheless, to find meaning and connection in our shared trials and trajectories with a powerfully decisive ear for sound and sensation.—C.J. Wagstaff