Night Angler

By: Geffrey Davis

Narrated by: Geffrey Davis

Length: 1 hr and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

• Night Angler won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.
• Night Angler is the second book by Geffrey Davis, whose previous book, Revising the Storm (BOA, 2014), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Prize and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Davis has also won the Dogwood First Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and the Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize.
• Davis has received fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center.
• Revising the Storm presents a fresh perspective on fatherhood and masculinity, embracing tenderness and self-doubt as essential aspects of a man’s identity. By coming to terms with his own complicated relationship with his father, the speaker is able to find a new way to parent his son. Davis’s poems will hold a particular appeal for parents, especially fathers affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s.
• Both the Black Lives Matter movement and fly-fishing feature heavily in Davis’s work, offering a rare cross-over appeal for those interested in racial justice and those interested in outdoors recreational activities.
• Davis has strong regional ties to the Pacific Northwest, in particular the Greater Seattle Area, in addition to his current hometown in Fayetteville, AR.

©2019 Geffrey Davis (P)2024 BOA Editions Ltd.

Critic reviews

“A strong second work after Revising the Storm that will resonate with any reader interested in the ties that lovingly bind.”—Library Journal

“From love letters and prayers surrounding youth, fatherhood, and family—to a river that holds the solace of fishing and life in the South—the book constantly evolves. Davis’s narrative poems comment on the mistreatment, the wonder, and the hope surrounding black lives, not only in the South, but in America as a whole.”—Arkansas International

“The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament. We partake in the rituals of fatherhood—both coming into and growing out of the spiritual bond. We witness the anguish of loss but also the possibilities of childhood. And in that threshold between life and death where all fathers and sons traverse, the brilliant harmonies of understanding arise in rainbowed arcs like epiphanic trout rising to kiss the sun. Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.”—Oliver de la Paz