fearless now & nameless
In Jon Davis’s latest collection, Fearless Now & Nameless, the poet directs his keen eye toward the ironies on which this life so often depends—the failures of language, the violence of nature, the indifference of death. “Is that what spirit is?” he wonders, considering the nature of birds, the thrasher, the finch “humping in the eaves. Gathering straw and string. / Laying the griefstuck delicate eggs.” As we read, we find our own eyes grow sharper, better able to take it all in.
With echoes of Blake and Dickinson, intimations of Stevens, and whispers of Derrida, Davis gives us a poetry that is playful, raging, and melancholic, sometimes all at once. Fearless Now & Nameless was written for this treacherous and timeless moment.
“In his latest collection, Jon Davis offers landscapes psychic and natural in poems that are at once vatic and painfully, beautifully human. In one, wasps scrawl ‘nonce/forms across the window’s bright page’; in another, Wallace Stevens peruses a craft fair and interrogates the ghost of art. This is a great work: enormously skilled, luminous, intricate, tragicomic, and ultimately a meditation on the mercurial and transformative powers of language, language that may ‘drift’ and ‘mold itself/to any circumstance.’”
“
Jon Davis’ poems in Fearless Now & Nameless move beyond the moment of immediacy, keep moving while still questioning until the light glows within, and the poems cast light instead of shadows. I’d be afraid for a world without poets who summon such illuminations.”
“A dive into Davis’ work will remind you of what is easy to lose track of in the current climate: finely-attuned to the resonant and mercurial aspects of language, poetry can travel widely and at real depth, can contemplate, grieve, excoriate, and discover rather than lecture. Fearless Now & Nameless is virtuosic, deeply-felt, harrowing, funny, and original. It is essential reading.”
About the Author
Jon Davis is the author of six chapbooks and seven previous full-length poetry collections, including, most recently, Above the Bejeweled City (Grid Books, 2021) and Choose Your Own America (Finishing Line, 2022). Davis also co-translated Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan’s Dayplaces (Tebot Bach, 2017). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry; Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic; Poetry is Bread; Photographers, Writers, and the American Scene; Poet’s Choice; Sixty Years of American Poetry; The Best of the Prose Poem; No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets; and Telling Stories: A Writer’s Anthology and have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, and Vietnamese. He performs in the poetry + rock band Clap the Houses Dark. He taught creative writing and literature for thirty years, two at Salisbury University and twenty-eight at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2013, he founded the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at IAIA, which he directed until his retirement in 2018. From 2012–2014, he served as the City of Santa Fe’s fourth poet laureate. He maintains a website at jondavispoet.com.
