Choose Your Own America by Jon Davis
$14.99
In Choose Your Own America, his thirteenth collection, but the first to include his short fables, Jon Davis casts a cold eye on our moment, revealing our fatuousness and our nobility both. Though Davis hopes we’ll choose “The America of gracias in the market, / miigwech on the subway,” first we’ll have to look at other choices. From a chilling scene of the Minutemen militia drilling in a neighbor’s meadow in 1960 to an encounter with one of those men twenty years later to a “Fashion Report” that explores the relationship between fashion and historical events to a popstar’s unlikely visit to a hip western town that ends with the locals ready to celebrate her arrival with their “world-renowned tuba ensemble … honking from the gazebo,” Davis’s reach is broad and includes everything from pop culture references to literary allusions to excursions into philosophy and theory. Though the hope is that it’s “early in this callous and retributional century,” Davis imagines an apocalypse in which “the computers and videos [go] on without us, the animated characters dying and restarting, dying and restarting, the jingles floating out over the otherwise silent streets.” The second half of the book, though, holds out hope, as in the two-line prayer that concludes “Carnal in the Land of Blood & Beauty”: “Omen, we say, a sound / more lips than tongue—half ominous, half amen.” Or in unexpected moments: “Nothing to do for an hour, the sun shining. The lake. The water going out. The same water coming back in.” The book weighs such moments against the weight of history and finds, miraculously, that the scales somehow balance.
“As an Immigrant-American, I believe that instead of that propagandic, bald-eagle-point-of-viewed country music video they show at citizenship ceremonies, we would do better with Jon Davis’ Choose Your Own America. These poems, both political and nipping at the heart, lyrical and essayistic alike, locate us inside a much more honest and existentially porous dystopian prophesy. Though it suggests we have choices, its disaffected tone makes our souls watch our every move. Where are the humans? it asks—and answers, too.”
–Ismet Prcic, author of Shards
Description
Choose Your Own America
by Jon Davis
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-924-4
2022
Jon Davis is the author of five chapbooks and seven full-length poetry collections, including, most recently, Above the Bejeweled City (Grid Books, 2021). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic; Photographers, Writers, and the American Scene; Poet’s Choice; Sixty Years of American Poetry; The Best of the Prose Poem; No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets; and Telling Stories: A Writer’s Anthology. His poems have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, KiSwahili, and Vietnamese. He taught creative writing and literature for thirty years, twenty-eight of them at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2013, he founded the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at IAIA, which he directed until his retirement in 2018. He served as the City of Santa Fe’s fourth poet laureate.
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