Nicelle Davis - Böcker

The Los Angeles Review is a literary journal of divergent literature with a West Coast emphasis. Established in 2003, LAR publishes both the stories of Los Angeles, endlessly varied, and those that grow outside our world of smog and glitter. LAR seeks voices with something wild in them, voices that know what it means to be alive, to be fallible, to be human.

The second collection by Nicelle Davis, Becoming Judas, is an \u201celemental bible-diary-manifesto,\u201d that weaves together Mormonism, Mamaism, Manson, Lennon, Kabbalah, and the lost Gospel of Judas into am ecstatic, searing meditation on raw religion. Nicelle Davis is a poet with an eye towards the spiritual. Loosely based on Davis’s upbringing in the back-room of a record store in Mormonville, Utah, this unexpected fusion becomes a \u201cspontaneous combustion\u201d of matter turning into energy. In these poems we encounter Jesus, Judas, YouTube, Joseph Smith, Hollywood, the Knights of Templar, Missouri, Utah, a prostitute, turnips, libraries, and God. Spirituality and faith eventually become, like Mallarm\u00e9’s \u201cDice Thrown,\u201d a game of chance: \u201cI know only chance. My feet will / won’t hit ground.\u201d Instead of choosing a faith based in the material world, which becomes a roll of the dice, Davis embraces the non-material of a pure energy: Let there be light.

Nicelle Davis's The Walled Wife unearths from the long-standing text "The Ballad of the Walled-up Wife," a host of issues that continue to plague women in the contemporary world: the woman's body as sacrifice; the woman's body as tender or currency; the woman's body as disposable; the woman's body as property; the woman's body as aesthetic object; the woman's body unsafe in the world she must inhabit, and in the hands of the people she loves.