Bøger af Chad Davidson

Could the shlock-rock '70s band Kiss in any way affect the outcome of a death-dealing twenty-first-century virus? Is Bob Ross--that permed, inimitable painter of Edenic nostalgia on PBS--actually an emissary from the land of personal loss? Might the work of Edward Hopper reflect facets of a global plague? What is the grammar, finally, of grief, of isolation? The essays in Chad Davidson's Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year mainly concern the loss of the author's father directly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which the pandemic itself provided a strangely ideal backdrop to grieving. Refracted through the kaleidoscopic, yet strangely stagnant, isolation period in the first year of COVID, his father's death--another plague visited on the author--found its way into all his waking hours, coloring whatever he tried to write, particularly when he tried not to let it. Friends both lost and nearly so, the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, even the seemingly inconsequential discovery of a rash of chew toys in the yard: these events assumed an unmistakable gravity, considered in the midst of a pandemic and the ruins of personal grief. Bring Out Your Dead adds Davidson's father to the growing list of loved ones lost in--and, in this case, right before--the pandemic. It's a personal memorial, given over to a father's memory and the grief endured while living through dueling plagues (one viral, the other psychological). In the end, the book becomes more about the ways we eulogize, how we remember those who are gone, why their memories persist, and what summons them back into our thoughts, our language, and our lives.

In From the Fire Hills, poet Chad Davidson shows us an Italy that is far from the romanticised notions of sun-drenched fields and self-discovery. Instead we see a maelstrom of chaos and contradiction, a place where the frenetic pace of modernity is locked in a daily struggle with recalcitrant history.

From odes to the corporate cornucopia of Target and the aggressive cheer of a Carnival cruise, to emotive examinations of Caravaggio's ""The Calling of St Matthew"" or flies circling a putrescent bowl of forgotten fruit, this title presents a lyrical web of apocalyptic scenarios and snapshots of pop culture.

Writing Poetry combines an accessible introduction to the essential elements of the craft, with a critical awareness of its underpinnings. The authors argue that separating the making of poems from critical thinking about them is a false divide and encourage students to become accomplished critics and active readers of poetic texts.