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Book Cover for: Native Species, Todd Davis

Native Species

Todd Davis

In his sixth book of poetry, Todd Davis, who Harvard Review declares is "unflinchingly candid and enduringly compassionate," confesses that "it's hard to hide my love for the pleasures of the earth." In poems both achingly real and stunningly new, he ushers the reader into a consideration of the green world and our uncertain place in it. As he writes in "Dead Letter to James Wright," "You said / you'd wasted your life. / I'm still not sure / what species I am." To that end, Native Species explores what happens to us--to all of us, bear, deer, mink, trout, moose, girl, boy, woman, man--when we die, and what happens to the soul as it faces extinction--if it "migrates into the lives of other creatures, becomes a fox or frog, an ant in a colony serving a queen, a red salamander entering a pond before it freezes." He wonders, too, "How many new beginnings are we granted?" It's a beautiful question, and it freights, simultaneously, possibility and pain. These are the verses of a poet maturing into a new level of thinking, full of tenderness and love for the home that carries us all.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Michigan State University Press
  • Publish Date: Jan 1st, 2019
  • Pages: 110
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.80in - 5.90in - 0.60in - 0.40lb
  • EAN: 9781611863154
  • Categories: American - GeneralGeneral

About the Author

Davis, Todd: -

Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry--Coffin Honey, Native Species, Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe--as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and coedited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year silver and bronze awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Western Humanities Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University's Altoona College.

Praise for this book

"Todd Davis's beautiful new book looks with patience, ardor, and often heartbreak at is beloved landscapes--both literal and figurative--and the ways those landscapes change, always change. Whether it's the land being ruined, the aging or dying of family and friends, or his own body turning and turning toward what it does, Davis holds his gaze steadily upon it all, gently upon it all, which makes for some mourning but also plenty of magic. A good deal of sorrow but even more wonder. Even more wonder. Look closely, this book reminds me. Look closer still."
--ROSS GAY, winner of a 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award