Jon Davis
“Davis’s poems so deeply probe the human condition that we find ourselves lost in new, perplexing, and unidentifiable territories, where our minds and our preconceived ideas about loss and remembrance, pain and epiphany are completely affected and changed.””
Jon Davis is the author of five poetry chapbooks and seven full-length collections of poetry: Above the Bejeweled City, Amiable Reception for the Acrobat, Improbable Creatures, Heteronymy: 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 of American Indian Arts before founding, in 2013, the IAIA low residency MFA in Creative Writing, which he directed until his retirement in 2018.
Above the Bejeweled City
“A cinder held between hearths—this masterful collection could only be written by a poet who gazed outward from a ‘balcony above the dying world,’ and saw that poetry remained even as the sirens of a pandemic drew ever closer. There is a sage presence here, so much about language, beauty, depth of emotion that tugs at what’s left of possibility and imagination.”
- Sherwin Bitsui, author of Flood Song
An Amiable Reception for the Acrobat
Poems by jon davis
“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.”
- Pam Houston
“By turns strange, funny, profound, and irreverent, this is an amazing, novel collection of poetry full of beautiful noise and powerful language.””
Improbable Creatures
poems by jon davis
Jon Davis’s latest book of poems is bursting with signature inventiveness and the nimble lyricism that David Foster Wallace once praised as “off-the-charts terrific.” Like the characters of a new alphabet, Davis’s creatures form the language of this stunning collection. And from them emerge new meanings for words we only thought we knew—of plumage, of song, of nest.
