Description
In her new poetry collection, Carol V. Davis crosses cultural and geographic boundaries to explore her family’s history as Jews, as outsiders, as immigrants. Ranging from Los Angeles to Nebraska to Germany to Russia, she probes the boundaries between faith, folklore, and superstition, trying to find her own way in landscapes that both beckon and threaten. The present, past and the human body move through the lens of her dark humor. Her restless mind is most at home at the uncomfortable edges where solace, when found, is ephemeral and fragmentary.
Contents
Acknowledgments
I
The Edge of Things
Sentries
Dare
Coneflower
Flying off the Page
Animal Time
Predicting Weather
Long Shadows
Hollowed Fruit
What Followed
The Equation
Late January, Wyoming Storm
II
Speaking in Tongues
What Really Happened
Contemplating Murder
Betrayal
Money Laundering
Into the Forest
Humor
Because One and the Other
What I’d Ban
The Dog Show
John Bower, Biologist, Explains Bird Calls
Let Rust Take its Rightful Place
This is Where We Stand
Because the Porchlight Flickered
III
Because
Black Hat
Even Now
A Watched Pot
Again the Crows
The Day It Changed
On the Eve of Yom Kippur, I Listen to the Rachmaninoff Vespers
The Butcher
Alphabets
Covering the Mirrors
What Is Faith, After All
Reflections on a Text, Ninth Century Spain
Shmita or the Seven-Year Itch
Watching Over the Body
IV
The Autopsy, a Love Poem
Big Sue
Interior at Paddington
Animal under the Clothes
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping
Evening in the Studio
Girl with a Kitten
Painter’s Mother Resting III
Queen Elizabeth II
Painter’s Mother IV
Pomme d’Amour
Something in the Water
V
The Secret Life of Bridges
Fire Season
Admiral Nimitz
What Is This Fear that Comes from Silence?
On a Suburban Street
The Motorbikes
Bottle
Playing Skachi in Siberia
Stumbling onto the Stolpersteine Project, Berlin
First Wife
Nothing Left to Do
Happyville
Master Class
Notes
Glossary
About the Author
Authors
Carol V. Davis is the author of Between Storms (Truman State University Press, 2012) and won the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg (TSUP). It’s Time to Talk About was published in a bilingual English/Russian edition (Symposium, Russia (1997).
Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, Davis has taught in Michigan and Russia, and now teaches at Santa Monica College and Antioch University, Los Angeles. In winter 2015, she taught in Ulan-Ude, Buryatia Republic, Siberia. Her poetry has been read on NPR, Radio Russia, and she has read at the Library of Congress.
Reviews
These poems are filled with premonition, prophecy, and shadow. The persona, confronted with ominous images emanating from the real and the imaginary—such as raucous crows, threatening moon, visitations sprouting wings—moves through various landscapes that threaten and beckon at the same time. These poems travel, and travel well. The ride is one you will remember and want to take again.
—Jim Barnes, author of Visiting Picasso and On a Wing of the Sun
The obligation of the poet is to help us make sense of what we do not know, do not believe, or cannot understand. Carol V. Davis’ Because I Cannot Leave This Body rather miraculously accomplishes all of these in poems both accessible and illuminating. This marvelous collection is part wisdom, part recollection, part explanation, part confession, part prayer, part journey. Davis takes us to Nebraska, Spain, Russia, California, and most importantly, to that interior country we never cease exploring. Ultimately, this book is a profound love letter to the relationship between language and the world we all travel through. It will make you never want to leave your body.
—Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry
In her fine new book of poems, Because I Cannot Leave This Body, Carol V. Davis explores her inner world and the course of her wide-ranging travels. She is drawn to her Jewish roots both by family history—as the “granddaughter of immigrants fed on mistrust and shadows”—and her study of ancient texts. Her poems move from California to Wyoming, from Moscow to St. Petersburg, from Berlin to Beijing, driven by an uneasy sense of the dangers of life. “Predicting Weather,” one of Davis’ most characteristic poems, juxtaposes a violent hailstorm in Nebraska and an earthquake in her native Los Angeles, ending with a sharply observed “moment of stunned beauty / before the crash of porcelain on tile.” A challenging and rewarding read.
—Chana Bloch, author of Swimming in the Rain: New & Selected Poems, 1980–2015
