The greatest collection of hockey-related poetry this or any house has ever published, and a watershed moment in American letters. Hockey haiku is the most rarefied of the haiku genres, and it represents the perfect union of graceful brutality, ordered chaos, and the blood that courses through our veins...and onto the ice. Hockey Haiku: The Essential Collection is full of poems that embody to perfection hockey’s unique harmony of beauty and violence. For example: Zamboni bumper: Don’t laugh---It crushed the leg of the Little Leaguer. And it turns to the questions we as a hockey society are reluctant to answer: Conflict--How can I pledge my allegiance to two national anthems?

Hockey Haiku: The Essential Collection

Humor & Entertainment

Davidson, Chad

Poch, John

Humor

Griffin

Review\n“In Terra Cognita, Chad Davidson clears a space for deeper, richer, far more profound questions and insights about Italy by seeing into the very conditions that render our sight dull and conventional.” -- Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers and Rough Likeness\n“Davidson’s skillful prose, deeply invested with humor and pathos, will complicate what you know―and what you think you know―about Italy.” -- Dionne Irving, author of Quint and The Islands\n“Terra Cognita will inspire readers to want to travel to Italy, and, by all means, discover their own truths, as well as find the astute meaningfulness that Davidson has wrought.” -- Allen Gee, author of My Chinese-America\n“It’s impossible to imagine a better tour guide than Chad Davidson to show us the riches and ruins of Italy. In each of these bustling essays, Davidson veers through Italian cities and towns, brilliantly exploring not only each boots-on-the-ground place but also what lingers in the tourist’s memory long after returning home.” -- Matt Donovan, author of A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption\nTwenty-seven years in the making, Terra Cognita chronicles the author’s continual travels―and problematic (if still, at times, ecstatic) encounters―in the “bel paese.” Across nine richly evocative essays, Chad Davidson investigates the seemingly never-ending fascination that travelers have with Italy.\nAs much a meditation on what home and away mean as it is a travel memoir, Terra Cognita finds literary predecessors such as Dante and Italo Calvino crowding in alongside more accustomed sights from travel shows, Hollywood films, and tourist guides. Though each essay departs from a particular location in Italy and remains rooted in the author’s own history there, the book ultimately becomes less about those places and more about the placelessness any such journey can engender, how―even after flying across an ocean and landing in a foreign country―we are still hopelessly and fully ourselves.

Terra Cognita: Dispatches from an Over-Traveled Italy

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

LSU Press

Could the shlock-rock ?70s band Kiss in any way affect the outcome of a death-dealing twenty-first-century virus? Is Bob Ross?that permed, inimitable painter of Edenic nostalgia on PBS?actually an emissary from the land of personal loss? Might the work of Edward Hopper reflect facets of a global plague? What is the grammar, finally, of grief, of isolation? The essays in Chad Davidson?s Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year mainly concern the loss of the author?s father directly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which the pandemic itself provided a strangely ideal backdrop to grieving. Refracted through the kaleidoscopic, yet strangely stagnant, isolation period in the first year of COVID, his father?s death?another plague visited on the author?found its way into all his waking hours, coloring whatever he tried to write, particularly when he tried not to let it. Friends both lost and nearly so, the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, even the seemingly inconsequential discovery of a rash of chew toys in the yard: these events assumed an unmistakable gravity, considered in the midst of a pandemic and the ruins of personal grief. Bring Out Your Dead adds Davidson?s father to the growing list of loved ones lost in?and, in this case, right before?the pandemic. It?s a personal memorial, given over to a father?s memory and the grief endured while living through dueling plagues (one viral, the other psychological). In the end, the book becomes more about the ways we eulogize, how we remember those who are gone, why their memories persist, and what summons them back into our thoughts, our language, and our lives.

Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year

Literature & Fiction

United States

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.

Consolation Miracle (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

Poetry

Southern Illinois University Press

The Last Predicta is Chad Davidson's searing collection of poetry dedicated to endings of all varieties. From odes to the corporate cornucopia of Target and the aggressive cheer of a Carnival cruise, to emotive examinations of Caravaggio's The Calling of St. Matthew or flies circling a putrescent bowl of forgotten fruit, Davidson weaves a lyrical web of apocalyptic scenarios and snapshots of pop culture. Throughout the volume appear cataclysms large and small, whether the finality of a minute passed or the deaths of a thousand swans at Seneca Lake in 1912. Images of King Kong, Starburst candies, and the Brady Bunch swim with mythological figures, Roman heroes, and dead animals as Davidson deftly explores the relationship between the mundane and the profound. At the center of the collection sits the Predicta television itself, "the lives blooming there in Technicolor," at once futuristic and nostalgic in its space age prophecy. Moving in their very simplicity, these poems resonate with discoveries that belie their seemingly ordinary wellsprings. Chad Davidson's stunning collection repeatedly explores the moment of revelation and all its accompanying aftermaths. The Last Predicta leads readers to ponder all manner of predictions, endings, and everything that follows.  

The Last Predicta (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

In From the Fire Hills, poet Chad Davidson shows us an Italy that is far from the romanticized notions of sun-drenched fields and self-discovery. Instead we see a maelstrom of chaos and contradiction, a place where the frenetic pace of modernity is locked in a daily struggle with recalcitrant history. 
This autobiographical collection explores the myriad ways in which Italian culture survives its own parodies and evokes a modern ferocity that harkens back to Italy’s barbarian past. As the narrator, rendered vulnerable by language, embarks on his journey, lines of location, time, and perception blur. From the siren song of Dante’s grave to the heights of San Luca, from streets where policemen with Uzis tread a hair’s breadth away from the macabre remains of Capuchin monks, Davidson’s Italy is a study in contrast between the contemporary and the classical, the sacred and the profane. Within these poems sensual and savage revelations unfold, exposing new, uncanny, and often uncomfortable spaces to explore in this well-traveled realm of Western imagination. 
Throughout the volume loom “the fire hills”: the scorched mountains of Sicily in summer; the memories of Italians living near the Gothic Line outside Bologna, where the Germans dug in and received heavy bombing at the close of World War II; even the wildfires igniting the San Gabriel foothills in southern California; all the way back to the burning city of Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid. As the ash settles and the smoke clears, we realize that what we remember is often just remains, shells, and burned out wreckage, as if there were another type of memory.

From the Fire Hills (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

“What if the end were as colorless as real / estate?” the speaker asks in Unearth. Poet Chad Davidson’s latest collection takes a hard look at our world as it collapses under numerous trials and tribulations. Fashioned mostly of elegiac poems, Unearth charts the way in which personal grief ripples out to meet and mirror larger systems of loss. The first section deals with local traumas and bereavements—the loss of pets, the disintegration of a friends’ marriage. These tragedies combine with more ominous, larger breakdowns in the second section until, in the final section, grief roils over into historical wickedness, institutionalized violence, and state-sanctioned wrath. Ultimately, “Even the mouth / of a volcano, from far away, / is beautiful.” The poetry itself offers us vessels into which we can pour out our despair. To understand the failing earth, Davidson’s speaker cajoles us to see the pain at its roots. From the opening poem—a reluctant elegy for a mother—to the final eschatological survey, an ode to maddening violence and destruction on a global scale, this collection imagines a world in which private and public terrors feed on each other, ultimately growing to a fever pitch. An act of resistance, this collection gives voice to our deep-seated emotional pain and offers us constructive ways to deal with it.

Unearth (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

How well can you decode the signs that permeate our daily lives? All of us, consciously or not, constantly engage in the acts of reading and interpreting the signs in the world around us. But how do we sharpen these skills, deepen our awareness of meaning in a complex world, and ultimately reach our full potential as university writers? This book answers the needs of students of composition, culture studies, and literature, providing a process-orientated guide to analyzing anything.

Analyze Anything: A Guide to Critical Reading and Writing

Reference

Fraser, Gregory

Words, Language & Grammar

Continuum

Dictionaries & Thesauruses

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

Books by Davidson, Chad

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

Hockey Haiku: The Essential Collection

Terra Cognita: Dispatches from an Over-Traveled Italy

Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year

Consolation Miracle (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

The Last Predicta (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

From the Fire Hills (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

Unearth (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

Analyze Anything: A Guide to Critical Reading and Writing

Analyze Anything: A Guide to Critical Reading and Writing