|
PRAISERevising the Storm is one of the best first books I've read in a long time. Its subjects—childhood, an absentee father, marriage, divorce, re-marriage, birth—are not new, but the approach is fresh, the language lyrical, and the poems well-tuned and masterfully wrought. Geffrey Davis is spellbinding. He knows how to bring even the smallest heartbreaking detail to light. Tenderly but firmly, he leads us down many paths toward the center of a life.
―Dorianne Laux, author of Only as the Day Is Long Geffrey 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 Geffrey Davis interrogates masculinity—as brother, son, father, lover—to examine the sources of love’s enduring and failed aspects. [...] I admire Davis’ emotional vocabulary, his attentive generosity and tenderness. Keep your eye on this gifted newcomer.
―Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me 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 REVIEWS...A finely wright meditative collection that calls to mind poets such as Carl Phillips and Jay Wright—yet, with his own concerns, and his own elegant phrasing. There's a classic feel to his poetry—yet he doesn't feel staid or stodgy in his lines or stanzas. It is a book that wears its poetic finesse lightly.
<<Hurston/Wright Legacy Award judges>> ...What is most striking about the poems, individually and as a group, is their ability to maintain calm in the constant flux of the stormy weather they and their narrators inhabit. Davis takes us through the liminal spaces between experience and memory, compels us to listen as stories unfold, and reminds us to be mindful of silence and breath as landscapes spin out of control. <<Fjords Review>> ...Revising The Storm is one of those books of utterly complex simplicity. You think that Davis is operating with a new spectrum of light in order to see the black and white truth. He let's you believe those things, momentarily at least, and then educates the reader with an expansive understanding of all shades of grey. <<Today's Book of Poetry>> ...Davis’ “place” seems to suggest that primal intersection of body, land, and word—an intersection where shame becomes wedded to our landscapes and our bones. Where, as he writes in “What I Mean When I Say Roller Pigeon,” “our obsessions can turn/ the miracle against itself.” <<Connotation Press>> ...These are poems for the ear and for the heart [...] Like a true modern romantic, his speakers are determined to love the world, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. <<ZONE 3>> ...when rendered in verse by a talented poet such as Davis, readers bare witness with new eyes [...] a considerable collection replete with the dark troubles and misfortunes of life that only serve to make its moments of beauty that much brighter. <<LA Review>> ...Almost all of Davis’s poems deserve rigorous explication not because they are complex for complexity’s sake, but because of the many meanings and emotions they hold. In fact, their intricacy and sharpness caused me to question my role as the reviewer while writing this review. <<Muzzle Magazine>> ...Davis’s lyrical debut is rooted in the tender memories of childhood [...] Signaling the frailty that we are made to feel when we’re vulnerable, these poems give voice to the important and powerful role of family. <<Library Journal>> ...painful twists of reality and even sentimentality that make families too close for comfort yet often beyond reach [...] Davis’ poems are sweeping, lyrical glimpses into masculinity, violence, drug use, and history. These poems are fresh and well-chiseled in word and line [...] Davis, a gifted wordsmith, presents a wonderfully complex and entertaining debut. <<Booklist>> ...Continuously challenging himself to ‘[t]ell it right this time,’ Davis displays an elegant tenacity that begs to be unleashed on subjects beyond personal history. <<Publishers Weekly>> ...Never prosaic but always knowable, the collection is in itself a storm that passes slowly but never disappears entirely [...] It is a feat for Davis to create so much tenderness here without being precious. All his subjects, even the loathsome ones, are beloved. All his speakers are filled with hope, always seeking a new definition for humane, constantly revising the storms inside themselves. <<The Rumpus>> |