Praise for Gathering Sound:

"Susan Davis does everything a poet should do in her first book of poems. But Gathering Sound is more than just a volume showing off her moves and her potential: Davis is clearly an accomplished poet already, and this collection demonstrates a powerful unity of voice and feeling. “Form allows the grieving their grief,” she writes, a grief mixed with genuine joy in her well-made elegies about art, about place, about work, about Jewish life, and about loved ones. From epigraphs to final couplet, Gathering Sound is a thoroughly satisfying book. "

Michael McFee, author of seven volumes of poetry,
including Earthly and Shinemaster

“Again and again, Susan Davis’s supple, wise, precise poems dive fearlessly
into an ocean of loss and emerge bearing consolation and hope. Individually,
they are acts of immense generosity. Taken together, they feel like a blessing.”

Marisa de los Santos, author From the Bones Out (poetry)
and Love Walked In (a novel)

“Though love of family and friends weave through the collection, grief and loss also dominate Davis’s work: ‘I’ve lost my faith in consolation,’ she writes. What she does believe in, however, is the ability of a poem to move, to affect a reader. These lovely, complicated poems combine an urban sensibility and pace with the Romantic’s love of wandering and general state of appreciation.”

Patty Seyburn, author of Diasporadic and Mechanical Cluster

“Consolation is never easy if we’re honest with ourselves, if we’re paying attention. The poems in Gathering Sound are fearlessly attentive; in fact, for Susan Davis paying attention is an act of honesty, an activity of grace. Her poems answer loss with hope, limn grief with beauty. And in the end, they console.”

James Harms, author of five volumes of poetry,
including Freeways and Acqueducts and Quarters

Susan Davis was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and graduated from Reed College and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. She is the co-editor with Gina Hyams of the -anthology, Searching for Mary Poppins: Women Write About the Intense Relationship Between Mothers and Nannies (Hudson Street Press/2006). She’s had a long career in public radio, working for Marketplace, National Public Radio, and North Carolina Public Radio WUNC. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with her husband and their two children.

excerpts

Adam Asks a Favor Wait, don’t make her yet. Before she takes the sound of wind into her mouth, before her moving shape shapes my waking, before her perfect instep marks this garden’s end, before my pulse starts its screaming, I need to ask you this. I have a feeling. Promise me she’ll be more flowers than trees, more fish than sea. Don’t let her be too much me or you or the word that binds us; don’t tell her our family name. Give her a voice less certain than wanting. Curl her hair as the morning glories curl each morning. Widen her eyes but shorten her fingers. Make sure she understands, I am the difference. If you wait to make her while I sleep you’ll have the best view of my dream. I want her to be what I need her to be, not me, but a picture of me.

The Hasids from my Window They are garment men, schmatta merchants, “in the rag trade,” my grandfather would say. I know they are waiting for ordinary things: truckloads of size 14 dresses in time for Easter. Yet, the courage of their leaning makes me breathless — when they stretch perpendicular to the building, one hand gripping the window frame, the other arched over bottle-thick glasses, surveying the open road. It was in this posture (swaying with anticipation) that they looked past me each Friday evening, towards the setting sun, as if some light might glance the coat of the hurrying messiah, on his way around the corner.