Last Beast We Revel In

Noah Davis’s first collection, Of This River, won the Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Southern Humanities Review, Best New Poets, Orion, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, North American Review, and River Teeth among others. He lives with his wife, Nikea, in Missoula, Montana.

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.

• After felling every beetle-blighted ash on the ridgeHow Blood Becomes the RiverPlaces FamiliarThe September Side of LightPoem Found on Three Springs RunI Ask What We Are Heron HeartAppalachian Lust SongMountain Salve ConceptionTrout HeartPortrait of the Beloved with Rain What I Hear as Crow Song GenesisOn the last day of rifle seasonPenance Telling My Beloved What I Lost on the MountainArguing Again in the AfternoonHound HeartPoem Sewn into My Hunting JacketIn April with my belovedPrayer for the People Who Pulled the Mountaintops Back Like a FingernailWith My Beloved Upon Waking from a Nap in a Field a Week Before the First HayingJuly Drought Tick TriptychThe morning after my mother saw my beloved and me sleeping in the same bedMercy SongMarchMy Brother and I Watch Dogs Chase Trains Over the Pig Hole BridgeIn Bed with My Beloved and an Elk LegHuman HeartI like to believeWedding PoemPoem Sewn into my Briar PantsSolstice BluegillsHere, Long Before My Father’s DeathPink Lady SlipperMotherBee HeartMy Beloved AsksMarriage PoemFrom the valleyGod came to me on County Road 26Think of Lips and What Earth Needs for VegetablesMy brother fought Dream with My Beloved and Honeycomb Ending with a Line from YeatsMy father gives me a knifeThe Last Beast We Revel In