Poppy Seeds

Spanning oceans and continents, language and the imagination, the unfathomable distances between people and their desires, Allison Davis's Poppy Seeds creates an "immaculate atlas." Here language is "broken. . . against the margin of the sea," and a word is a thing that can be "wash[ed] away." Here the body is both a lesson and a place with an edge you can drive to. The book "longs[s] for as long as Ohio rivers." Tangled between worlds and languages both old and new, our deepest emotions search for their roots, hoping to find a place to call home.