Revising the Storm

Finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry One of Library Journal’s “Thirty Amazing Poetry Titles for Spring 2014” Winner of the 2013 Anne Halley Poetry Prize This debut collection by Cave Canem fellow Geffrey Davis burrows under the surface of gender, addiction, recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored—tender, comic, wry, tragic—interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their “embarrassed desires” for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the ’80s and addresses issues of masculinity and its importance in family. “My Last Love Poem for a Crackhead, #23” Some nights I hear my father’s long romance with drugs echoed in the skeletal choir of crickets. At each approach, a silence cuts in. And I wonder which part speaks more to this dance with addiction: the frailty of concord or the hard certainty of the coda’s chai