One Wild Word Away

Geffrey Davis is the author of three poetry books, 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. Davis currently lives in the Ozarks, where he teaches full-time with the Program in Creative Writing & Translation at the University of Arkansas.

"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.’” — Blas Falconer, author of Forgive the Body This Failure“‘Only LOVE’ is at the heart of this honest, searching new collection by Geffrey Davis in which tender and intricate language transforms raw material: a stuttering marriage, the ghost of a father's addiction, the hauntings of a hard past in a newly-hard, newly-hopeful present. How does the child-self still within us understand ‘my chance to see I would survive // looking a blessing in its full face before believing/ I deserved the voice of light.’ Davis, again and again, displays a fierce insistence to seek and offer tenderness to even the most brutal violence; to find ‘awe with wings as slick as any ruin’ or to see ‘morning // adorned that glade's depressions / with a little light.’ In poem after poem, he shows us that brokenness means, if we can be truthful, not only challenge, but also hope: ‘the sidewalk's unevenness, buckled / by the old roots below.’ I will turn to this book when I need someone to help me find my way back to that most complicated and simple act: love.” — Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica, co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry