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Adam O. Davis' poems have appeared in many journals, including The Believer, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and ZYZZYVA. The recipient of the 2016 George Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, he has received grants and fellowships from Columbia University, Western Michigan University, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of the University of California, Riverside and Columbia University, he lives in San Diego, California where he teaches English literature at The Bishop's School. He was also once hit by lightning. It felt, more or less, like you'd expect.
Versifying / Collection Development: Poetry, Library Journal Hypervigilant, fidgety, and frightened as it should be, Index of Haunted Houses nonetheless shows us how to rake through the rubble for what we might still rebuild with, and in its consummate achievement, generates flashes of much heretofore unseen beauty, unleashing phrases that 'arc like / swans in (the) cochlea's / cul-de-sac.' -Timothy Donnelly The reader finds herself in America's afterlife, with Ma Bell's pre-automation telephone operators. This is the elegant lyricism of 'too late,' calling 'Ladies please wake up. I want to try again.' -Rae Armantrout Adam O. Davis has written a brilliant book about our ghosts-personal, political, mythic, lyrical and yet very real. He documents and chronicles the musics of the unsaid, melodies unheard. There is America in these pages and there is also childhood, parenthood, a rhythm and nuance of being. I love this music. -Ilya Kaminsky From 'the body of New Jersey' to 'the desert/like a house of belief,' the poems of Index of Haunted Houses traverse the entirety of time and space that we call American. In this book, Adam O. Davis means for language as precise as 'ledgers lavish with loss,' to lead us to the place within us where history meets landscape. This is a brilliant debut. -Jericho Brown Time and again I was pulled in, kept close to the collisions between the self and the passage of time which populate the poems. The beauty of the language engenders intimacy. The reader easily steps into the text. The wonderful imagination of this poet reminds us the mind-lyric space-is an astonishing nexus. -Eduardo C. Corral
