Winner of the 2026 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Jill McDonough, Bottoming for Dummies is a funny, formally dazzling, and sexually candid exploration of what it means to surrender without disappearing.

Taking inspiration from A Midsummer Night's Dream, James Davis transforms Shakespeare's Bottom--a weaver famously turned into an ass--into a guide through queer desire, shame, family, faith, and pleasure. Here, bottoming is both an erotic position and a way of meeting the world: a controlled relinquishing of control that can become an act of trust, truth-telling, and strength.

Sonnets, sestinas, triolets, anagrams, and poems inspired by Scrabble's two-letter words encounter dildos, drag brunch, video games, pet tarantulas, Sonic the Hedgehog, and a lovelorn Eeyore. Beneath the collection's audacious humor and wordplay are deeply vulnerable poems about the complicated bonds that shape a life.

Unabashedly gay, tender, and inventive, Bottoming for Dummies argues that pleasure can be political, language can remake what once wounded us, and sometimes yielding is how we discover our power.