Full Description
In Coffin Honey, his seventh book of poems, celebrated poet Todd Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction—both personal and across ecosystems—are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young boy who has been sexually assaulted struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named Ursus navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother's death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world. Each poem in Coffin Honey seeks to illuminate beauty and suffering, the harrowing precipice we find ourselves walking nearer to in the twenty-first century. As with his past prize-winning volumes, Davis, whose work Orion Magazine likens to that of Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, names the world with love and care, demonstrating what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of "Latin names, common names, habitats, and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness."
Contents
Contents If We Have to Go Buck Day Hunting with Dogs Music for Film before the Destruction of a Drone Taxidermy: Cathartes aura Rooster What I Know about the Last Lynching in Jeff Davis County Bad Seed As the Mountain Grows Dark Before the Miscarriage Churching the Cow Ursus in the Underworld dream elevator Mother What Her Father Taught Her Coffin Honey Dowser Field Sermon Lambing Tattoos Cataract Her Back Bog Parable dream elevator Extinction Possum Up on Blue Knob Foot Washing Blind Horse The Book of Miracles Foxfire Snapper Relics dream elevator Bear-Eater Bodies in May A Map What the Market Will Bear Pawpaw Elegy Ursus Considers the First Gospel of Snake The Cedars in the Pasture Ursus Grows Wings Learning to Tie a Fly Lost Blue dream elevator This Tired Flesh Snow's Memory Learning to Walk Upright Until Darkness Comes Of This World Watershed Winter Solstice When I Survey the Wondrous Cross Museum: Ursus americanus How to Measure Sea Level Rise When the Stones Are Undone In the Garden To Wake from Long Sleep in Darkness What We Died For Sitting Shiva Acknowledgments
