One Wild Word Away

When tensions veer between hope and despair, the ensuing fracture can swing like a scythe and cut a ragged seam between past and present. In One Wild Word Away, Geffrey Davis weaves a deft set of poems about illness, family, loss, and rebirth. The luxurious sonics and crisp descriptions in each line are haunted by grief and buoyed by love as the speaker confronts generational trauma and the potential loss of a loved one while in the process of raising his own son.

Geffrey Davis is the author of three books of poems, most recently One Wild Word Away (BOA Editions, 2024). Davis’s second book, Night Angler, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and his debut, Revising the Storm, received the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His poems have been published by The Atlantic, New England Review, ​​The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine​, Oxford American, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Raised by the Pacific Northwest, he served as Poetry Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review and is a core faculty member of The Rainier Writing Workshop. Davis currently lives in the Ozarks, where he teaches full-time with the Program in Creative Writing & Translation at the University of Arkansas.