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.

"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