Song of Gray approaches Black experience by clarifying the concrete worlds that exist between humanity and objecthood. Asha Futterman renders this in-between space as it reveals itself in performance: in a contemporary performance workshop, at an audition, in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in the dailiness of the YMCA, her porch, the walk to the train.

These poems build new logic systems. Futterman stands at her grandmother’s grave and proclaims, “how powerful how dense and naked how inaccurate.” With quiet, deadpan, and piercing language, Song of Gray offers earnest, felt relationships to race, empathy, pleasure, and nonsense. 

“There wasn’t a sunrise / just gray / then brighter gray.” In Song of Gray, blackness is not definite—it is an ambivalent hole as much as an area of hope. Blackness is a song of gray

Asha Futterman is an actor and poet from Chicago. She holds an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Her chapbook empathy was published by The Song Cave in 2024. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Bennington Review, Conduit, and The Journal. She currently teaches children in Brooklyn.