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    Night Angler
    Night Angler
    Night Angler
    Ebook105 pages25 minutes

    Night Angler

    By Geffrey Davis

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    About this ebook

    WINNER OF THE 2018 JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD

    Geffrey Davis’s second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for Black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood. Filled with humor and tenderness, Night Angler sings its own version of a song called grace—sung with a heavy and hopeful mix of inherited notes and discovered chords.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateApr 30, 2019
    ISBN9781942683797
    Night Angler
    Author

    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.

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      Book preview

      Night Angler - Geffrey Davis

      Night Angler

      Night  

      Angler

      POEMS BY

      GEFFREY DAVIS

      AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES, No. 172

      BOA Editions, Ltd.     Rochester, NY     2019

      Copyright © 2019 by Geffrey Davis

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      First Edition

      19  20  21  22 7  6  5  4  3  2  1

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

      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 Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; 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 96 for special individual acknowledgments.

      Cover Design: Sandy Knight

      Cover Art: Andrew Kilgore

      Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

      BOA Logo: Mirko

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Davis, Geffrey M., 1983– author.

      Title: Night angler / poems by Geffrey Davis.

      Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., 2019. | Series: American poets continuum series ; no. 172 | Includes bibliographical references.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2018050058 | ISBN 9781942683780 (paperback : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—21st century.

      Classification: LCC PS3604.A956968 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050058

      BOA Editions, Ltd.

      250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

      Rochester, NY 14607

      www.boaeditions.org

      A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

      Contents

      I.

      The Fidelity of Water

      Hymn or Hum

      The Radiance

      The Night Angler

      Bop: No More Your Mirror | Side A: My Son’s Prelude

      Survivor

      First Blood

      Human Note

      The Epistemology of Cheerios

      Prayer with Miscarriage / Grant Us the Ruined Grounds

      A Proposal from the Previously Divorced

      Pillow Kombat with the Ultimate Sleep Fighter

      Son’s Face

      What I Mean When I Say Harmony

      II.

      Self-Portrait with Headwaters

      Self-Portrait as a Dead Black Boy

      III.

      I Have My Father’s Hands

      Smolder

      The Book of Family

      What Make a Man

      From the Country Notebooks

      The Fidelity of Music

      The Night Angler

      Poem in Which My Son Wakes Crying

      Arkansas Aubade

      What I Mean When I Say Harmony

      3:16 :: Whosoever

      3:16 :: So Loved

      3:16 :: For

      3:16 :: World

      3:16 :: Blackout

      IV.

      Like a River

      V.

      From the Suicide Notebooks

      The Fidelity of Angles

      What I Mean When I Say Harmony

      Bop: No More Your Mirror | Side B: My Wife’s Fugue

      Pleasures of Place

      The Epistemology of Growing Pains

      West Virginia Nocturne

      Hear the Light

      For the Child’s Mole

      The Night Angler

      Notes

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Colophon

      because Ramona …

      because Edwin, Cary, and Nikki …

      because Lissette …

      because Carlos, especially …

      I wake to listen:

      A far sea moves in my ear.

      —Sylvia Plath

      and the great black hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown

      it is there I will now fish the malevolent tongue of the night in

      its motionless veerition!

      —Aimé Césaire

      A river … has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.

      —Norman Maclean

      I.

      The

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