The Last Beast We Revel In

These are poems that love the world. The humans, plants, and animals, “who we have named and who have named us” are integral to every line. Every shadow in this book and every light, every death and joy in it is felt and loved by that mutual naming. And so, the world Noah Davis holds open for us is full of love, and is an intimate world even as it is an expanding one.
 

-- Leah Naomi Green, author of The More Extravagant Feast, winner of the Walt Whitman Award

Noah Davis seeks out the animal-self in poems that never shy from the messy territories of the erotic. Time is the axle this book spins around—future and past losses exist alongside the present-tense pull of language, of the sacred and the flesh, of landscapes observed and imagined. I celebrate the ardor these poems cling to, all the equally grand and understated ways The Last Beast We Revel In stakes its claims for human connection against the backdrop of our increasingly cynical age.
 

-- Michael McGriff, author of Eternal Sentences, winner of the Miller Williams Prize

I love when Noah Davis makes a line because he is also making a world, a town where mining companies paid men to blow the tops of mountains off. Davis remakes those mountains through careful attention to the flexibility of language. These poems of the heart were dug out of the ground where bears, crows, rivers, and deer are carved into the land and the speaker’s body until we encounter body-land, land-body.
 

-- Tyree Daye, author of Card