Steve Davenport's Bruise Songs is aggressive--21st century blues, a rap for the times, a hymn for the hurts we bear and for which we recover.&nbsp; As the poet invokes in "Dear Horse I Rode In On," his poetry is the curl of rind the lick of salt the shaved barkings of all these lines or limes I cut and squeeze for bruise songs, my cowboy brag.&nbsp; Rhyme is everything in song.&nbsp; You done me wrong. He leads us to muddy waters where he asks us to sing his "two-chord, carp killin' river song," or gives us access to love letters to cerebral angiograms:&nbsp; "I find the clot you leave under the bruise.&nbsp; I ask that you open lines of time."&nbsp; It takes a life to sing blues so hauntingly.

Bruise Songs

Literature & Fiction

Davenport, Steve

Poetry

Stephen F. Austin University Press

Poetry. Winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award for an outstanding first book-length collection of poetry or prose. "Uncontainable Noise is wildly alive: a collage that is part shoot-out at the poetry corral, part love story, a collection that overmodulates fearlessly into new domains of tone. Steve Davenport has created a new world that is ribald, violent, reverent, and thoroughly word-drunk. . . . Davenport's playful, linguistically rich poems -- sonnets, yodels, yawps, howls, cool parables, badass laments -- are inventive, surprising. Anyone who loves language and imagination will revel in this exuberant, truly uncontainable, first book." (Alice Fulton) "The energetic poems of Uncontainable Noise ride and drink and sex across three different relationships, moving, in the course of the book, from pain to happiness with an obsessive, iterative drive suggestive of the pleasures and burdens of love. The language here remembers itself, sends roots forward into other poems, words and lines recur and loop, as you would expect in any fundamental working-through." (Bob Hicok)

Uncontainable Noise

Pavement Saw Press

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Books by Davenport, Steve

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Davenport, Steve. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Bruise Songs

Uncontainable Noise