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...Davis imagines a song that contains all the contradictions within us, a song to guard against illness, loss, and death, all the old stories of our past. He imagines a new story, too, one that “brightens something else between us.” This book is that song. We can hear it, this love, and “It hums like mercy.”
―Blas Falconer, author of Forgive the Body This Failure ...Davis, again and again, displays a fierce insistence to seek and offer tenderness to even the most brutal violence; to find "awe with wings as slick as any ruin" or to see "morning // adorned that glade's depressions / with a little light." In poem after poem, he shows us that brokenness means, if we can be truthful, not only challenge, but also hope: "the sidewalk's unevenness, buckled / by the old roots below." I will turn to this book when I need someone to help me find my way back to that most complicated and simple act: love.
―Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica |
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Davis’s poems reveal the small slants of light, the unusual turns of fate, the near invisible machinations―of humans and nature―that ripple through everything with consequences yet also always with a breathless and radiant redemption...
―Chris Abani, author of Smoking the Bible In Davis’s stunning collection Night Angler there is a grace fathered by risk, a wonder mothered by worry. These lines cast and cast through generations of fathers to find music and floods and hands that can deliver both tenderness and violence...
―Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal ...Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.
―Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets ...While you will be lured into this book by its “blood-song for/ the marrowed ache and awe of tomorrow,” you will be released, upon reading the final poem, breathless.
―Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold |
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...Davis translates and transforms our contemporary modes of love, violence and history. Revising the Storm feels written by a poet who has traversed several previous lives and honed them into a language of beautiful survival. Urgent, tender, imaginative: this is a tremendous debut.
―Terrance Hayes, author of Watch Your Language In these passionate and patiently crafted lyrics of male experience, the most urgent concerns always turn toward others. Revising the Storm has more substance, more searching and satisfying insight, and more emotional intelligence than most first collections. You will want to read it more than once.
―Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of As Is: Poems ...There are delicate, intricate poems here, stormed by memory, always in motion. If the family is the greatest catastrophe, it is also the source of our most profound joy. Geffrey Davis reminds us how to survive and endure both. (from the Foreword)
―Dorianne Laux, author of Only As the Day Is Long |