Pyrrhic Symphony

Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Prize and the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in AGNI, the Believer, the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, ZYZZYVA, and in The Best American Poetry. Davis is cocreator and host of the podcast Poetry Goes to the Movies, and of its digital collection for the Poetry Foundation.

"Pyrrhic Symphony is wild, whip-smart, and irreverent—a maximalist elegy for late capitalism and ecological disaster, set to a beat both comic and catastrophic. It's part Muriel Rukeyser, part Anne Carson, with a dash of HBO satire and TED Talk dystopia. Its central conceit—a series of poetic 'dispatches' from a world breaking under the weight of its own consumption—is sustained across dazzling poems like 'Future Tense' and 'Anthropocene Cool.'"—Rowan Ricardo Phillips, poetry editor for the New Republic and author of Living Weapon"Adam O. Davis writes with elegance and grace, as if he, too, is surprised by what his unfettered mind conjures—and, with us, he is shaken by his younger self's curious coldness and his final meditation on empathy and disconnection. The title poem is symphonic, emotionally complex, and rewards rereading."—Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them and The Fears and 2026–27 Texas Poet Laureate"One must surrender to the music of Adam O. Davis's Pyrrhic Symphony—ear vibrating with plosives and rhyme, and the mind stumbling song-drunk just behind. Music here is also medicine, and a poem is 'the pill or the pharmacy.' It's an old word, pharmakon, meaning that which kills and that which cures, poison and panacea both. Can one die of a diagnosis? I don't know—but I do know these poems are the mythic medical chart of contemporary America, a country that no longer has on the cupola of its capital the goddess Curiosity, but instead, a windvane Nurse. Davis knows we need a nurse, here where 'the supermarkets are open all night and the honeybee is dead.' Fever burns out the germ, and the syllables of these poems pitch us past blood-heat, kill or cure, I'm not sure, we'll just have to wait and see. But such poems can be our good, strange caretakers, a dose of hope to help us understand our helplessness."—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Wind-Mountain-Oak: The Poems of Sappho

• [These lines, nurse, are for you.] Natural HistrionicsAnthropocene CoolPyrrhic SymphonyThe Nurse on the Nature of SilenceSelf-Portrait as BeehiveAbstract BirthThe Nurse on National Prayer Future TenseTornado DebtThe Nurse on the Consumer Abstract InfidelityNabisco TheologyThe Nurse on Domestic LanguageMutiny by FishThe Nurse on the Theory of the SelfThe Last Dream of WaterThis is a TestThe Nurse on the Reality of AirNotes from the Republic of NoThe Halloween HabitSelf-Portrait as the Interstate Highway SystemUnderworldSoft Manifesto The States Pyramid DreamTo Whom It May ConcernThe Aspirin AgeThe Nurse on Westward ExpansionInsect ChorusSome GhostThe Nurse on the First Dream of FireTerminal FelicityStations of the CrossedSelf-Portrait as ParableThe Goodnight RulesOmaha Divorce NotesAcknowledgments