Praise for An Amiable Reception for the Acrobat
“In Acrobat, Jon Davis, poet of jazz, blues and misery, of daughters and horses, of regret, asks the questions we’ve been avoiding. What if we were wrong about art’s humanitarian potential? What if all this time we should have been feeling instead of naming? What do we do with the dawning realization that the apocalypse, by comparison, turns out to be the easier choice? This is the work of a great, and largely unsung American poet at his most relentless, at his most and least wise; it is a map to hold in our hands as we fly off the end of the world”
“By turns strange, funny, profound, and irreverent, this is an amazing, novel collection of poetry full of beautiful noise and powerful language.”
About the Author
Jon Davis is the author of five poetry chapbooks and five previous full-length collections of poetry: Improbable Creatures, Heteronomy: An Anthology, Preliminary Report, 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 for American Indian Arts before founding, in 2013, the IAIA low residency MFA in Creative Writing, which he directed until his retirement in 2018.
