Unearth

“‘I'd love a revelation,’ says Chad Davidson, and the poems in Unearth unroll illumination after illumination as he contemplates his mother's death, Pluto, comets, family life, Italy, and the bombs going off all over the world. Davidson is equally adept with a microscope and a telescope as he moves through the tenuous fabric of his days, taking his readers into the beauty and heartbreak of the twenty-first century. A gorgeous book.”—Barbara Hamby, author of Bird Odyssey
 
“As the title suggests, our lives are an incessant foraging through our id-like history, personal and collective. No surprise then that his inventively tough-skinned poems should live in the shadows of disaster. But while Davidson offers up grief and loss at every turn, he also hints that some redemption is possible. In one poem, a voice from the dead declares: ‘We are such slow-burning happiness.’ The paradox—one of many in this book—electrifies. So we move from poem to poem—ever deeper.”—Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies
 
“Davidson’s fourth book unearths the exquisite spoils of grief and the splendor of heresy. These elegiac poems range from his mother’s death to the alleyways of Rome glittering with black rain. He is a modern Odysseus, the man of twists and turns. He voyages the oceans of loss and language and returns home to find us here, unfinished and broken. He brings us the spoils and the salvage—beautiful rage and elegant despair—because, as he tells us, ‘Disasters also tell us stories.’”—Jeffrey Thomson, author of Half/Life: New and Selected Poems