Inna Jane Ray's poems in California Hours move between childhood memories and imagined futures across a dramatic human and natural landscape. Written in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, Ray’s eight-poem cycle painted the effects of drought, flood, fire, and urbanization in her native California. Bonnie Barrett's new design of the 1982 hand-bound book makes Ray's work accessible now and includes samples of her art gleaned from her sketchbooks, paintings, and photography. This edition (2021) includes a foreword by Janet Nippell.
Inna Jane Ray pulled The Fifth Direction together in final form in 2019, near her life's end, folding in the earlier Holy Moly Poetry. These are poems as prayers—wry, anguished, closely observed—written in the San Francisco East Bay area from the early 1990s through 2009, which includes her time of "wandering the ragged edge that marks our wrench from heaven," as Ray described theology study. A fourth section, created from 2010 on, employs the itinerant "Crockett Mary" to reflect on life, soul, and aging and adds a handful of new poems at the end. The second edition (2024) has a foreword and author biography by Janet Nippell.
The Knot Garden
Begun in Los Angeles, with vital drafts added in West Marin before 1990, Inna Jane Ray's The Knot Garden had a long gestation. Ray's growing poetic maturity over twenty years enabled her to catch in a loose but enduring net "characters adapted from Malaysian creation stories, themes of Buddhist meditation practice, and quirky contemplations of Catholic Sister Fishwick" (as Ray put it in 2012), as well as her Los Angeles photographer poems. "What is the shape of the world?" Ray asks. The second edition of The Knot Garden (2024) contains an afterword by Janet Nippell.
The Atonement Muddle is Inna Jane Ray's master's thesis, published in 1997 by the Center for Women and Religion at Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union and revised and republished by Ray in 2013. She asks, "Do you have to believe that Jesus Christ suffered and died to pay for sin to call yourself a Christian?" The book traces the development of atonement theory as it began in the early Church and moved through medieval theology into the present. Ray acknowledged her teachers and other feminist thinkers and described her thesis as being "of particular interest to contemporary women who have experienced abuse, bullying and battering at the hands of individuals and institutions who claim to be doing so in the name of Jesus."