One Wild Word Away

(Paperback)

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With the constancy of a story told by the fireside, Geffrey Davis weaves a deft set of poems between illness and recovery, despair and hope, and faith in true love that defies a single form.The poems luxurious sonics and crisp descriptions are haunted by grief just as they are buoyed by love as the speaker confronts trauma passed down from generations in the process of raising his own son and losing someone dear.

These poems create a hymnal of small things: the patter of rain on windows, the movement of cancer through a body, a fathers hands on a crack pipe, a sweet moment with a sleeping son. Throughout every disparity, faith in personal connections steadily guides the reader through the human experience in all its suffering and splendor.

Reviews

"In One Wild Word Away, Geffrey Davis imagines a song that contains all the contradictions within us, a song to guard against illness, loss, and death, all the old stories of our past. He imagines a new story, too, one that brightens something else between us. This book is that song. We can hear it, this love, and It hums like mercy.

Author Bio

Geffrey Davis is the author of three books of poems, most recently One Wild Word Away (BOA Editions, 2024). Davis's second book, Night Angler, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and his debut, Revising the Storm, received the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His poems have been published by The Atlantic, New England Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Oxford American, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Raised by the Pacific Northwest, he served as Poetry Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review and is a core faculty member of The Rainier Writing Workshop. Davis currently lives in the Ozarks, where he teaches full-time with the Program in Creative Writing & Translation at the University of Arkansas.