Preliminary report

de Jon Davis

"The poems in Preliminary Report vary in form from short personal lyrics to prose poems and long meditative pieces, and in subject from global politics to philosophy, mysticism, love and family, Strange, luminous imagery is punctuated by subversive humor and play." "I guess this is a prayer to the unsettle are of mortality, the hoist and shuffle of this uncertain moment, our lives like bulbs flaring and going out as this city's seven million souls--ah, but that's another argument--click out their bedside lamps and curl toward whatever approximation of warmth they have found, while the music plays on in the streets belowm, the neon humming, the ambulances wailing the sudden shocked song of the living." ""Davis is as good as DeLillo at playing off our internal hunger for meaning against surfacesenslessness, And Davis catches the surface brilliantly."--American Book Review" ""Davis says, Look around you. People decide every morning to live. How do we manage that? These poems are a necessary answer."--Shirley Kaufman" ""[Davis's work has] an intellectual and moral urgency... Although Davis is not a religious poet, he shares Rilke's quest for union [and] seeks an awareness that only multiple points of view can provide."--The Prose Poem: An International Journal"--BOOK JACKET.