Passiflora

Poetry. In this gorgeous debut collection, Kathy Davis announces, ‘I’ve no illusions of control’ –yet even as this book celebrates profusion, it manifests aesthetic control, unsentimental intelligence, and tightly leashed feeling. In fields of fleabane and wiregrass, women are taught to suppress their own wildness but burst out anyway in appetite and laughter. Cancer grows inside, jasmine tangles outside, yet this ecopoetic book cultivates restoration and consolation. Reading it is to imagine healing. –Lesley Wheeler