Geffrey Davis
WebsiteYears: 2012, 2013
Biography
Geffrey Davis is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin Poetry Prize. He is also the recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Dogwood First Prize in Poetry, the Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Award, nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and a Graduate Residency from Penn State's Institute for Arts and Humanities. He is a founder and editor of Toe Good Poetry and serves as an Associate Director for the Summer Institute for Literary and Cultural Studies. Recent work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, [PANK], and Sycamore Review, among others. Davis holds degrees from Oregon State University and Penn State University, and he teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas.
Poem
Venison
In my previous life as a deer, I honed my brand
of nervousness, balanced instinct and memory,
sharpened that ability to slip silently between
thicket and meadow, changing from fluid motion
to some frozen effigy of the thing—: existence
reduced to traveling my predispositions. Poised
over the hard hoof, I tested the live weight of
never feeling all the way prepared, searched out
spoiled apples beneath winter’s ice, at a moment
ready to morph into a fleeing patch of white
haunch among the naked trees. I raced against
the hunter’s success, against the day
he would hit the muskiness of my hide
and the hot, mercurial life beneath it—: carve me,
freeze me, the velvet vastness of my body
parceled out to loved ones, in easily stored pieces.