Preliminary Report
Published on 1. July 2010
96 pages
978-1-61932-006-2 (ISBN)
Description
"Davis is as good as DeLillo at playing off our internal hunger for meaning against surface senselessness. And Davis catches the surface brilliantly."-American Book Review
Punctuated by subversive humor, verbal theatrics, and moments of strange, luminous beauty, Davis' clear, unsentimental poems are meditations and mediations on contemporary existence and the unreliability of language, emotions, and the memory to gather it all in.
Jon Davis, author of five collections of poetry, earned his MFA from the University of Montana. He has received a Lannan Literary Award and currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Jon Davis received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, where he was editor of CutBank. He has published five collections of poetry, including Scrimmage of Appetite, for which he was awarded a Lannan Literary Award. Since 1990 he has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Content
- Cover
- Title Page
- Note to Reader
- Contents
- An Introduction to Tonight's Performance
- I
- Invention of Memory
- Yodel
- Portrait of My Mother, 1957
- Black Spaniel & Drunk Parents
- The Fish
- Of the Merely Personal
- Adolescence
- A Modern Form
- The Incandescence of the Present
- Horse in Shadow
- Against Structuralism
- What Is a Person? What Must One Do?
- Apophenia
- The Accounting
- Monk
- Preliminary Report from the Committee on Appropriate Postures for the Suffering
- II
- The Good Life
- The Memorist
- Hunger Song
- Art & Life
- The Sea. Not the Sea.
- Etymology
- Accident
- The Literal
- Notes to The Haitian Poems of Madeleine du Plessix
- Jade Buddha
- Moon, Predawn Courtyard, Santa Fe, New Mexico
- Bouquet
- The Horse, Susan Said
- Prayer to the God of War
- Music
- III
- A Brief History of Heartbreak
- Tuba City
- The Pot Spinners
- Shimmer
- Festival of Natural Disasters
- How the World Works
- The Immortals
- What Now?
- The Modern Condition
- Midlife Suite
- Giraffe
- Utilitarianism
- Piñon & Moon
- In Darkness
- Loving Horses
- Ma Roulotte
- Seriousness
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
- Copyright
- Donor page
