Revising the Storm

By Geffrey Davis and Dorianne Laux

This debut collection by Cave Canem fellow Geffrey Davis burrows under the surface of gender, addiction, recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored—tender, comic, wry, tragic—interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their "embarrassed desires" for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm also speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the '80s and addresses issues of masculinity and its importance in family.

Some nights I hear my father's long romance
with drugs echoed in the skeletal choir

of crickets.

Geffrey Davis teaches at Penn State University.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Mar 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781938160295

Geffrey Davis

Geffrey Davis is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His honors include the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have been published in Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and The Rainier Writing Workshop low-res MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. He also serves as the poetry editor of Iron Horse Literary Review.

Book preview

REVISING THE STORM

WINNER, 2013 A. POULIN, JR. POETRY PRIZE

SELECTED BY DORIANNE LAUX

Copyright © 2014 by Geffrey Davis

All rights reserved

First Edition

141516177654321

For information about permission to reuse any material from this book please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [e-mail].

Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the County of Monroe, NY; the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 92 for special individual acknowledgments.

Cover Design: Sandy Knight

Cover Art: Malynda Shook

Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn

BOA Logo: Mirko

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davis, Geffrey M., 1983–

[Poems. Selections]

Revising the storm : poems / by Geffrey Davis ; foreword by Dorianne Laux. — First Edition.

pages cm.

ISBN: 978-1-938160-29-5

Includes bibliographical references.

I. Title.

PS3604.A956968A6 2014

811'.6—dc23

2013042541

BOA Editions, Ltd.

250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

Rochester, NY 14607

www.boaeditions.org

A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

Contents

Foreword

I. The Book of Father

What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse

King County Metro

Revising the Storm, 1991

Instructions for a Fourth-Grade Report on Texas

What I Mean When I Say Chinook Salmon

The Epistemology of Birds

What I Mean When I Say My Name Is Nobody

Call Me Now

Unfledged

What I Mean When I Say Roller Pigeon

What I Mean When I Say Elijah-Man

A Poem for God

More Than Forgery

What I Mean When I Say Truck Driver

What My Father Might Say, If I Let Him Speak

My Last Love Poem for a Crackhead, #23

From the Unsent Letters: To Klamath Falls Correctional Facility

II. Diaspora

The Newakum River

Write the Memory of Throwing the Stone

Teaching Twelve-Year-Olds the Trail of Tears

Venison

How Can I Be 1/32nd Blackfeet?

If the Moon Were My Lover

What I Mean When I Say Diaspora

My Mother’s Uncle

The Epistemology of Hospitals

The Epistemology of Gentleness

The Epistemology of Marriage

Divorce Means

From 35,000 Feet / Praise Aviophobia

Meditation at a Pennsylvania Diner: Early Morning

Write the Memory of the Girl Dancing in Apple Blossoms

6th Avenue Flora

III. Here a Coursing Wall, There a Slanted House

I Dream of Meeting Myself, Age Seven, County Fair Field Trip

The Epistemology of Rosemary

Farmer’s Market Sweet Plums: Apology to the Flower Lady

Dear Destruction

Like This, For a Reason

Ode to Trout

What I Mean When I Say Forever

The Discipline of Waking Love

What We Set in Motion

The Epistemology of Preposition

Upriver, Downstream

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Colophon

Foreword

Revising the Storm is one of the best first books I’ve read in a long time. Its subjects—childhood, an absentee father, marriage, divorce, remarriage, miscarriage, birth—are not new, but the approach is fresh, the language lyrical, the