Description
Poetry. In his seventh poetry collection, Jon Davis exhibits the range and mastery that is the result of fifty years of study, teaching, and practice. ABOVE THE BEJEWELED CITY opens and closes with homages to Federico Garcia Lorca's dream-struck ballad "Romance Sonámbulo." In between, he inhabits what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the "inexplicable existence" that marks our passage here on Earth.
Part absurdist, part satirist, part tender correspondent, Davis writes in the slipstream of writers like Joyce, Beckett, Parra, and Plath. In an age that calls out for hopeful verse, ABOVE THE BEJEWLWED CITY offers, instead, a treatise on defeat and despair—and on how letting go is a way of holding on.
Author Bio
Jon Davis is the author of five poetry chapbooks and five previous full-length collections of poetry: ABOVE THE BEJEWELED CITY (Grid Books, 2021), AN AMIABLE RECEPTION FOR THE ACROBAT (Grid Books, 2019), IMPROBABLE CREATURES (Grid Books, 2017), Heteronymy: An Anthology, PRELIMINARY REPORT (Coper Canyon Press, 2010), Scrimmage of Appetite, and Dangerous Amusements. He was co-translator, with the author, of Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan's Dayplaces. Davis has received a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, the Peter I.B. Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts' poetry fellowships. He was the city of Santa Fe's fourth Poet Laureate and taught for 23 years at the Institute of American Indian Arts before founding, in 2013, the IAIA low residency MFA in Creative Writing.
Author City: SANTA FE, NM USA