Purchase at an Independent Bookstore in RVA:
Read a Review of Passiflora by Craig Beaven, author of Natural History, in diode poetry journal. Beaven’s new manuscript, Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You, was selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2021 Anhinga Robert-Dana Prize for poetry, and he won CutBank’s 2021 Chapbook Contest. Both are now available for purchase!
Readings:
Friday, October 21, 2021 at 7pm with Sheri Reynolds as part of 2021-2022 VCU Visiting Writer Series
Friday, June 25, 2021 with Nazifa Islam at Rhino Reads!
Advance Praise for Passiflora
In this gorgeous debut collection, Kathy Davis announces, “I’ve no illusions of control”—yet even as this book celebrates profusion, it manifests aesthetic control, unsentimental intelligence, and tightly leashed feeling. In fields of fleabane and wiregrass, women are taught to suppress their own wildness but burst out anyway in appetite and laughter. Cancer grows inside, jasmine tangles outside, yet this ecopoetic book cultivates restoration and consolation. Reading it is to imagine healing.
—Lesley Wheeler, author of The State She’s In
Kathy Davis’ poems may begin in the domestic, but almost invariably end in a place that is startling, unfamiliar, and quietly estranging. And, thanks to the exactitude of her style, these transformations never seem less than inevitable. Hers is a voice of unobtrusive confidence, whether she is fashioning wry character studies or stern self-reckonings. These are haunting, bittersweet, and slyly consoling poems. Passiflora is a debut collection of the very first order.
—David Wojahn, author of for the scribe, World Tree and Interrogation Palace
Intelligence, in its best meanings. The radiant presence of an informed and informing sensibility. An authentic voice with plenty of attitude. We hunger for these characteristics in our engagements with all the arts and hope for nothing less in what we’re willing to call poetry. In Passiflora we encounter the attentive eye of a passionate naturalist in poems that bring light and color—along with ironies and pain—into realizations of human lives reflected and rooted in the eruptions of wild life: the seeds, plants, animals, and landscapes that are the foundations of survival and the potent wellsprings of wisdom and joy. Kathy Davis weaves the most sophisticated, intimate variety of braided poem, as in the consummately crafted “For My Son’s Birth Mother,” an invitation to the vivid observations of a woman walking through a San Diego art exhibit in a poem that subtly yet poignantly reveals the inescapable undercurrent in her thoughts—the intensities of caring for an adopted child. Davis brings to her revelations a kind of taste and judgment that is not about regulation or limitation, but about courage and respect. In these devotional poems, the erotics of the human body are intertwined with the perfumes of flowers and healing herbs in a collection whose every page brings an awakening, an expansion of experience, acutely satisfying a yearning of which we had been unaware.
—Gregory Donovan, author of Torn from the Sun and Founding Editor, Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts
