From a prizewinning poet whose work “points to an unfathomably bright future for the canon” (Danez Smith), a stunningly lush collection about desire, mythology, and our fraught and ecstatic relationship with the natural world
A collection as remarkable for the force of its feeling as for the range of its vision, End of Empire explores personhood, and especially Black womanhood, within an ecological framework. Inspired by the language and landscape of the poet’s rural Kentucky hometown and the ways that inherited religious and political narratives shape our relationships with our surroundings and ourselves, these poems reckon with the ways the speaker, their body, and their natural and ideological surroundings continuously remake each other. Formally dynamic, emotionally resonant, and rich with biblical, mythological, and historical allusions, these are elegant, impeccably crafted pieces that evoke the fearsome power of nature and of the tangled, sensual self.
Marissa Davis is a writer, translator, editor, and educator from Paducah, Kentucky. Her work can be found in Poetry, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Rattle, West Branch, Mississippi Review, Muzzle Magazine, Frontier Poetry, and Best New Poets, among others. Her translations are published or forthcoming in Northwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Mid-American Review, The Common, RHINO, American Chordata, and The Offing. Following years in Nashville, Tennessee, and Paris, France, she now resides in Brooklyn, New York.
View titles by Marissa Davis
From a prizewinning poet whose work “points to an unfathomably bright future for the canon” (Danez Smith), a stunningly lush collection about desire, mythology, and our fraught and ecstatic relationship with the natural world
A collection as remarkable for the force of its feeling as for the range of its vision, End of Empire explores personhood, and especially Black womanhood, within an ecological framework. Inspired by the language and landscape of the poet’s rural Kentucky hometown and the ways that inherited religious and political narratives shape our relationships with our surroundings and ourselves, these poems reckon with the ways the speaker, their body, and their natural and ideological surroundings continuously remake each other. Formally dynamic, emotionally resonant, and rich with biblical, mythological, and historical allusions, these are elegant, impeccably crafted pieces that evoke the fearsome power of nature and of the tangled, sensual self.
Author
Marissa Davis is a writer, translator, editor, and educator from Paducah, Kentucky. Her work can be found in Poetry, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Rattle, West Branch, Mississippi Review, Muzzle Magazine, Frontier Poetry, and Best New Poets, among others. Her translations are published or forthcoming in Northwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Mid-American Review, The Common, RHINO, American Chordata, and The Offing. Following years in Nashville, Tennessee, and Paris, France, she now resides in Brooklyn, New York.
View titles by Marissa Davis
