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Consolation Miracle

Consolation Miracle

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Chad Davidson

$15.95

Paperback (Other formats: E-book)
978-0-8093-2541-2
80 pages, 6 x 9
10/09/2003

Crab Orchard Series in Poetry

 

Additional Materials

About the Book

Consolation Miracle is a book of visceral, image-driven poems that search for the miraculous in the seemingly ordinary. This collection fashions art out of artless objects as a consolation, or perhaps compensation, for their smallness. Yawns and pears, cockroaches and crows resonate against historically conflated backdrops, while our own hands seem suddenly strange as they hide themselves in our pockets, balance a burning cigarette between two fingers, or grip the gun that shot Lincoln. Other poems address the destruction of empire, the end of old Hollywood, and the hyperbolic fizzling out of entire centuries. Here, consolation miracles are rarely the ones sought after, yet they radiate in their neglect. Davidson’s poems help us understand the inner life of cows, imagine the plight of a banished Kama Sutra illustrator, speculate about Cleopatra’s lingerie. With a title borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez, Consolation Miracle contains a magical realism for the twenty-first century.

Authors/Editors

Chad Davidson is an assistant professor of English at the State University of West Georgia. His poems have appeared in Colorado Review,Crab Orchard Review, DoubleTake, Epoch, The Paris Review, Pequod, Poet Lore, and numerous other publications.

Reviews

“Chad Davidson is a poet of brilliant, unanticipated mixtures: a postmodernist who cares deeply for grace and clarity; an odemaker with a penchant for the epigrammatic; a philosopher of both gravitas and levity. His elegantly crafted surfaces never mask character or abbreviate temperament. Davidson means to bring the whole person to the page. Consolation Miracle announces a poet that I look forward to reading for years.”—Rodney Jones, author of Kingdom of the Instant and Elegy for the Southern Drawl