Books
“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, author of Deep Creek, Finding Hope In The High Country
“By turns strange, funny, profound, and irreverent, this is an amazing, novel collection of poetry full of beautiful noise and powerful language.”
—Tommy Orange, author of There There
Improbable Creatures
“The improbable creatures in Jon Davis’s magical new collection include birds, conquerors, poets, parents, philosophers, coyotes, musicians, lovers, communists, and even ‘the other Jon Davis.’ With directness, humility, candor, and, above all, a generous talent, this Jon Davis offers shimmering solutions for the ongoing dilemma of being human. ”
— Dean Rader, author of Landscape Portrait Figure Form
Scrimmage of Appetite
"Off-the-charts terrific..."
--David Foster Wallace
“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.”
--June Owens