Becoming Judas

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

The second collection by Nicelle Davis, Becoming Judas, is an \u201celemental bible-diary-manifesto, \u201d that weaves together Mormonism, Mamaism, Manson, Lennon, Kabbalah, and the lost Gospel of Judas into am ecstatic, searing meditation on raw religion. Nicelle Davis is a poet with an eye towards the spiritual. Loosely based on Davis's upbringing in the back-room of a record store in Mormonville, Utah, this unexpected fusion becomes a \u201cspontaneous combustion\u201d of matter turning into energy. In these poems we encounter Jesus, Judas, YouTube, Joseph Smith, Hollywood, the Knights of Templar, Missouri, Utah, a prostitute, turnips, libraries, and God. Spirituality and faith eventually become, like Mallarm\u00e9's \u201cDice Thrown, \u201d a game of chance: \u201cI know only chance. My feet will / won't hit ground.\u201d Instead of choosing a faith based in the material world, which becomes a roll of the dice, Davis embraces the non-material of a pure energy: Let there be light.

Reviews

"'I wasn't ready to be swallowed / by the fire of another, ' writes Nicelle Davis in the title poem of her stunning collection, Becoming Judas. And yet, she is, in these poems, swallowed over and over--by grief, by betrayal, by faith and its loss, by music, by love. In turn, she swallows all of these whole, and more. These poems are smart, jazzy, and ecstatic, and they encompass everything: our 'homemade religion, ' Mormonism, the lost Gospel of Judas, Charles Manson, motherhood and daughterhood, the music of John Lennon, the deep mysteries of bees. Becoming Judas is a gorgeous, fast-moving, exhilarating collection from an extraordinarily talented young poet."
--Katharine Coles

"Nicelle Davis weaves--as one of her religio-sacred-cosmos 'spiders' pokes--the elemental, mother-daughter, Judas-Jesus-Lennon substances, meta-histories and neo-gospels devouring us as we disintegrate and are reborn to love this grand body-bible-book.
Hold this, if you can--devouring mind at work, singing razor-writer of stanza-line fractal syncopations into photo, interview, letter incantations; as Anne Waldman has said of her poetic conduction, 'a new-beyond-gender fecund horizon.' A new elemental bible-diary-manifesto, yes, and also a musical score of the spider-woman who writes in prayer 'octaves.' You hear voices--angels, demons, Azrael and Manson, Jesus and Judas, daughter and granddaughter--masks, sheafs, harmonies, and dissonances that few can hear, decipher, or re-magnetize through the ethers and 'star compounds' once our skins are stripped and hanging from the ancient suffering trees. Wait: there is Doo Wop down the highway as we careen with Nicelle's genius magic in this grand, magnificent, luminous creation-braided-fleshspirit word book. You have to caress and then let all unravel. A cosmic whip. A mesmerizing opus, prize-winner, yes, all the way."
--Juan Felipe Herrera

"Becoming Judas is an evocative, traumatic gathering of poems--fractured reflections and imploding laments, ghost-psalms, odes and unuttered prayers, along with a disclaimer in verse, bits of a real interview, and apocryphal email. It's a book about homage and homemade religion, Joseph Smith and John Lennon, about kisses and cages and coins and the end of the world, when it comes, as the end of love. A gorgeous exorcism, finally, this is, as well as a series of doors, each opening onto another, each looking back and beyond, vertiginously outward and in."
--Kirk Nesset

Author Bio

Originally from Utah, Nicelle Davis now resides in Lancaster, California, with her son, J.J. Becoming Judas is her second book. Her first book, Circe, is available from Lowbrow Press. Her third collection, In the Circus of You, will be released by Rose Metal Press in 2014. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Beloit Poetry Journal, The New York Quarterly, PANK, SLAB Magazine, Two Review, and others. You can read her e-chapbooks at Gold Wake Press and Whale Sound. She runs a free online poetry workshop at The Bees' Knees Blog and is an assistant poetry editor for Connotation Press and The Los Angeles Review. She has taught poetry at Youth for Positive Change, an organization that promotes success for youth in secondary schools, and with Volunteers of America in their Homeless Youth Center. She currently teaches at Antelope Valley College.