Gion Davis, Designated Stranger

You can actually run away. You are allowed to go, at least for a little while. You can drive all over the place and end up in California and eat fried cod in Fort Bragg and half-joke about moving there even though you know you won’t because small towns you can only get to by wild little highways aren’t really your thing anymore.

 

You are allowed to have the most perfect day you can remember, even though you are tired from sleeping on an inflatable mattress in some stranger’s living room. It’ll be a day where it doesn’t matter than you are trans, that you are newly twenty-eight, that you are waiting on the hospital bill from your boyfriend having to go to the ER with COVID after you lost your insurance because you quit your job three weeks ago to run off into the country.

 

It won’t matter that you’re a poet standing under some giant redwoods and wondering if they ever have perfect days and what those days are like. Maybe just the right amount of sun, just the right amount of rain, just the right amount of passing nutrients back and forth to one another underground in secret. It’s hard to imagine anything going wrong for them. I stood in the burned-out heart of a tree that was still healthy and enormous everywhere except right at the bottom in the middle which was empty. You could have lived inside it. Maybe someone has. (“The Thing No One Wants You to Know”)

Following his full-length debut, Too Much (Ghost Peach Press, 2022), comes Denver, Colorado-based poet Gion Davis’ latest, the collection Designated Stranger (Logan UT: Thirdhand Books, 2026). “there are parts of me / I will never see / there are parts / of Louisiana / that are underwater,” he writes, as part of the poem “Simple Divorces.” There’s a restlessness to the poems in this collection, one that emerges from a narrator seeking out their place; wandering, for the sake of seeking somewhere to settle, or even feel comfortable, perhaps, working to articulate a wandering period of youth, and the current realities of being transgender and poor in America. “You can’t imagine it: the smell drying onto cardboard & into an old / Red wheelbarrow full of stomachs heavier & whiter than the moon.” begins the poem “Nothing’s Hanging Out Going to Whole Foods,” “They do not / Do that where you are from. Where you are from, a velvet rope runs the circumference / Of death & you stood in line with a ticket just to touch it.”

As the press release offers, the book “spans years, states, genders, and climates as it confronts the concurrent apocalypses of being trans and poor in America,” as Davis offers poems that are smart and exploratory, exhausted and declarative, utilizing a sharp use of both the lyric sentence and the line-break, prose poems and accumulated phrases. “I wanted to live / in this junk drawer / of a city with you / among the pyramids,” begins the poem “Goddamn Universe,” “and piles of ripped up / rebar like wads of hair / from a brittle brush / beside the Mississippi.” Or, as the poem “How to Be a Good Man (If Conditions Are / Better to Be a Wildfire)” ends: “Wear a shirt that is nonthreatening. / Try on that pair of Wranglers / again. Maybe they’ll fit you / if you surprise them. / Come home to one person / in your bed every night / and stay who you are / for the rest of your life.”