Native Species

Todd Davis is the author of six full-length collections of poetry as well as of a limited-edition chapbook. His writing has won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, and the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. He teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

• Contents Geomorphology I. Almanac of Faithful Negotiations Goat’s Milk Perception Passerine Hard Winter The Woman Who Cuts My Hair Cracks How Our Names Turn into Light Hexagonal First Thoughts about God after Spying a Speckled Trout Eat a Green Drake Talus Slope Geodes My Mother’s Cooking Failed Argument against Sorrow Finding a Skull Because This Is What Love Comes To In the Seventh Month My Mother Worries Decadence Denomination 17-Year Locust Hibernation II. Lost Country of Light Green Beans Dead Letter to Elizabeth Bishop The Alzheimer’s Patient Tries to Remember the Names for Trees What Came Before Lessons from the Flood The Mennonite’s Daughter Goes Down to the River First Kiss What My Aunt Virginia Says When She Visits Lineage What Water Wants Valley Maker Memory Native Species The Turtle Taxidermy: Cathartes aura For the First Nine Months We Perceive the World through the Eyes of Our Mother The Mink A Senior Citizen at the Good Shepherd and Water of Life Assisted Living Center Asks Her Son for a Sky Burial Dead Letter to James Wright III. Seep Generosity The Rain that Holds Light in the Trees Gnosis Waiting to Hear If a Friend’s Wife Has Cancer Notes on the Anniversary of the Death of Galway Kinnell After Twenty-Seven Years of Marriage Dead Letter to Richard Hugo With Nothing Between Us and the End of the World Self-Portrait with My Dead Logjam on Lookout Creek Appalachian Nocturne: Ursa Major Returning to Earth Thankful for Now Coltrane Eclogue And If There Is a Day of Resurrection Acknowledgments

“Todd Davis’s beautiful new book looks with patience, ardor, and often heartbreak at is beloved landscapes—both literal and figurative—and the ways those landscapes change, always change. Whether it’s the land being ruined, the aging or dying of family and friends, or his own body turning and turning toward what it does, Davis holds his gaze steadily upon it all, gently upon it all, which makes for some mourning but also plenty of magic. A good deal of sorrow but even more wonder. Even more wonder. Look closely, this book reminds me. Look closer still.”—ROSS GAY, winner of a 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award