Jordan Davis, Yeah, No

 

The Apricot

The red and white folded with gray
shadows of the American flat
reflected and beating I the concavity
of the silver orange bowl three seeds
ridged with spikes of here red here
orange dried fruit the spikes like
the edge the edge like the shell
of a crab the damp gray day
left at the isthmus the apricot

The third full-length poetry collection by Brooklyn poet, editor and publisher Jordan Davis, following Million Poems Journal (Faux Press, 2005) and Shell Game (Edge Books, 2018), is Yeah, No (Cheshire MA: MadHat Press, 2023). Whereas I had seen two chapbooks by Davis prior to this—NOISE, which appeared last year through my own above/ground press (full disclosure) and Hidden Poems (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]—this is the first full-length collection of his I’ve seen (although the poems of NOISE do exist within). From the title alone, one can see how Davis revels in the collision of words and meanings, allowing a combination of collision and pivot to form new shapes, utilizing thoughts and phrases that occasionally even seem to run each other through. “Believing me, believe me, be believing me.” he writes, to open the poem “Loud Singing,” “I found the envelope empty. / I did not know I was not supposed to open the envelope.” Long associated with the flarf poets, as his author biography attests, his poems are sensory, rhythmic and gymnastic, simultaneously flippant and dead serious—showcasing elements of the “serious play” that bpNichol often referenced—offering lyrics neither surreal or straightforward but clearly made out of words. “A pirate in a repeat environment / plays tag in the ironing.” the poem “Eleven Forgiven” begins, “Entangle the raiments. / Peeved, tap clogs, / the livery of pillory talk / evangel living as foreign / as the driver of the Rangers’ van.” Davis’ craft is clear through the speed and the ease through which his lines roll; composed as moments, but fractured, fragmented; offered to keep the mind slightly off-balance, guessing. Not merely blending but smashing together political commentary with pop culture, Davis’ poems aim, one might say, not for the “a-ha!” conclusion of traditional lyric, but one of moments altered and alternate, working to see what else might be gathered through how phrases are formed. “Do the easy things first, get some momentum.” he writes, to open the poem “Think Tank Girl,” “It’s a management principle. Also? / You might make sure you’re not poisoning apples / in the sprawl, claiming responsibility / for turning the hillside from smooth dark green / to a grid of pale cubes, an avocado / you’d invent to feed your young. / In a free market they call sneak attacks troubleshooting.”