Steve Davenport's Bruise Songs is aggressive--21st century blues, a rap for the times, a hymn for the hurts we bear and for which we recover. As the poet invokes in "Dear Horse I Rode In On," his poetry
is the curl of rind
the lick of salt the shaves
barkings of all these lines
or limes I cut and squeeze
for bruise songs, my cowboy
brag. Rhyme is everything
in song. You done me wrong.
He leads us to muddy waters where he asks us to sing his "two-chord, carp killin' river song," or gives us access to love letters to cerebral angiograms: "I find the clot you leave under the bruise. I ask that you open lines of time." It takes a life to sing blues so hauntingly.