Overview

Davis artfully traverses paths of personal trauma, chronic illness, and identity, exploring how language and lyricism become acts of survival. The work is a tapestry of fragments-portraits of family, love, loss, and resilience-woven together with precision and heart. Throughout, literary figures such as Lucille Clifton and Ruth Stone appear as luminous guides, offering solace and strength in the darkest moments. What begins as an exploration of survival gradually transforms into a bid for connection, belonging, and creative reclamation. Poetry emerges not as a solution to suffering, but as a companion and witness to it.

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Reviews

""This slim and affecting collection of lyric essays is an invitation to lift the roof off a dollhouse peopled with complex, transfixing figures; one walks along its hallways lined with books written by the author's literary mothers, while other mothers remain achingly elusive, calling from a room just around the next corner, or the next. These flash essays are lightning just outside its windows, illuminating with brief, undeniably clarifying bursts of language. To read this book is to explore the nuances of what it means to be both child and parent, writer and reader; to enter this dollhouse is to leave changed, moved by the author's revelations of both art and self."" -Jennifer Murvin, author of She Says (Small Harbor Publishing) and False Alarm (GreenTower Press) ""Josh Davis's Authentic Embellishments is a poet's memoir-a testament of survival despite all the things that threaten the poet's body and spirit. Abuse, violence, neglect are the landscape in which poetry enters the narrator's life to imbue them with a devotion to their own peace-that we must keep searching and finding and learning, that to not continue is to close the book of ourselves on ourselves mid-sentence. In these formally queer and inviting pages: magick, poetry. The act of mother-making, of floundering for parental love is the ghost in these pages, taut with poetic lines and the witchcraft of the heart's synesthesias. Josh Davis is a writer and a poet whose work is determined and fierce. Authentic Embellishments will envelop my mind for years to come."" -Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria (Four Way Books)

Author Information

Joshua Davis is the author of Reversal Spells in Blue and Black (Seven Kitchens Press) and, with Allison Blevins, the co-author of Chorus for the Kill (Seven Kitchens Press) and fiery poppies bruising their own throats (Glass Lyre Press). He holds an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine, an MFA from the University of Mississippi, and an M.A. from Pittsburg State University. A former John and Renee Grisham fellow, he offers online workshops and private mentoring at The Poetry Barn. Recent work has appeared in ONE ART: a journal of poetry, The Hunger, and TAB. He teaches high school near Tampa, Florida.

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