Winner of the 2025 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Craig Morgan Teicher

“Asha Futterman’s debut, Song of Gray, is a book of devastating insight and clarity, and introduces a vital new poet. America’s inexhaustible racism is one urgent muse: in sharp, staccato lyrics that leap easily back and forth across the lines of logic, Futterman maps ‘the abyss/ between nothingness and infinity,’ an area of gray areas, where ‘a black name is often registered/ as little more than an encounter with power.’ These poems drive toward a kind of offhand aphoristic wisdom, toward language so irreducible, it could only be the truth: ‘he died shoveling snow/ that melted the next day/ poetry makes/ nothing happen.’ Again and again, Futterman arrives at a tense sort of wisdom—‘there is no changing what is happening/ what is not happening’—which is to say, everything is something else and also nothing else. These are confusing, terrifying times: I want these remarkable poems for company.”  —Craig Morgan Teicher

“‘words and pictures are not more important / than real sounds,’ writes Asha Futterman. Song of Gray shows us how to hear them. Attuned to subtle rhymes between ideas and images, theater and candor, Futterman’s searching lyrics cut right through American pieties around empathy and freedom and see ‘the blood / in my mind in the clouds.’ Against a fake world, the poet studies acting knowing it isn’t about pretending, it’s a way to sing a potent song of reality: soulful, funny, and exquisitely unsentimental. What an indelible debut.”   —Margaret Ross

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 work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Bennington Review, Conduit, and The Journal. She currently teaches children in Brooklyn.