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Overview
Geffrey Davis’s second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for Black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood. Filled with humor and tenderness, Night Angler sings its own version of a song called grace—sung with a heavy and hopeful mix of inherited notes and discovered chords.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781942683780 |
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Publisher: | BOA Editions, Ltd. |
Publication date: | 04/30/2019 |
Series: | American Poets Continuum , #172 |
Pages: | 96 |
Sales rank: | 789,650 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Pillow Kombat with the Ultimate Sleep Fighter
Those who say they “sleep like a baby” haven’t got one. —found fortune cookie proverb
Like in a video game, size does nothing to decide advantage:—my demure son throws his demure weight around our family bed with resolve, and so I revolve inside discomfort’s orbit, the planet of my sleepiness demoted, dwarfed—unstudied! Just as I reach my parental threshold of self-denial, just as I go to reinstate the matter of physics—energy and force—he executes his special move: a combo of lovey words struck half-consciously across the dark, launching me into another vain-cycle search for deep space shuteye. Then his favorite toy sheep tucked between my folded arms (FINISH HIM!). Then the fresh delicacy of his foot plopped upon my forehead (FATALITY).
Table of Contents
I
The Fidelity of Water 13
Hymn or Hum 15
The Radiance 17
The Night Angler 18
Bop: No More Your Mirror | Side A: My Son's Prelude 19
Survivor 20
First Blood 21
Human Note 22
The Epistemology of Cheerios 23
Prayer with Miscarriage / Grant Us the Ruined Grounds 24
A Proposal from the Previously Divorced 25
Pillow Kombat with the Ultimate Sleep Fighter 26
Son's Face 27
What I Mean When I Say Harmony 28
II
Self-Portrait with Headwaters 31
Self-Portrait as a Dead Black Boy 33
III
I Have My Father's Hands 41
Smolder 42
The Book of Family 43
What Make a Man 45
From the Country Notebooks 46
The Fidelity of Music 48
The Night Angler 49
Poem in Which My Son Wakes Crying 50
Arkansas Aubade 51
What I Mean When I Say Harmony 52
3:16 :: Whosoever 53
3:16 :: So Loved 54
3:16 :: For 56
3:16 :: World 57
3:16 :: Blackout 59
IV
Like a River 63
V
From the Suicide Notebooks 69
The Fidelity of Angles 72
What I Mean When I Say Harmony 73
Bop: No More Your Mirror | Side B: My Wife's Fugue 74
Pleasures of Place 76
The Epistemology of Growing Pains 77
West Virginia Nocturne 78
Hear the Light 79
For the Child's Mole 81
The Night Angler 82
Notes 86
Acknowledgments 87
About the Author 90
Colophon 96
What People are Saying About This
“The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament. We partake in the rituals of fatherhoodboth coming into and growing out of the spiritual bond. We witness the anguish of loss but also the possibilities of childhood. And in that threshold between life and death where all fathers and sons traverse, the brilliant harmonies of understanding arise in rainbowed arcs like epiphanic trout rising to kiss the sun. Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Oliver de la Paz
“In Geffrey 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. This is the book I want to give to all the parents in my life so they can see their own struggles and songs and be reminded that the lessons we offer our children are often the ones we need most, that ‘there are those who touch a body and leave it graceful: be that kind of wonder.’” Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade
”Geffrey Davis’s poems reveal the small slants of light, the unusual turns of fate, the near invisible machinationsof humans and naturethat ripple through everything with consequences yet also always with a breathless and radiant redemption. Love, fatherhood, family, loss are all engaged with lyrically and with a deeply engaging and persuasive insight. Davis is a quietly brilliant poet.” Chris Abani, author of Sanctificum
“Geffrey is a master of the turn … Geffrey’s work tackles manhood, fatherhood, sonhood… love, and sexuality with a boxer’s hands: firm and weathered, capable of so much violence and wreckage, but purposefully gentle and fond when handling our fragile humanity … Folks, get into Geffrey Davis. This man is a wonder of strength & delicacy, someone that we will watch for years and he muscles his way to the venerable & quiet.” Muzzle Magazine, “30 under 30”