Honeymoon Palsy

“Make no bones about it,” Chelsea Rathburn writes: “Juliana’s Gray’s dark and dangerous third collection is preoccupied with death.” The sometimes macabre, often witty poems of Honeymoon Palsy move through history and myth, the public and the personal, culminating in a central series combining Hamlet with elegies for Gray’s father, who died suddenly the day after his second wedding. In poems about art, desire, marriage, and murder, Gray leavens mortality with wry humor, reminding readers that we all are “waiting to feel the catch / of some great, unbearable hook."