Pyrrhic Symphony: The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Autor Adam O. Davisen Limba Engleză Paperback – sep 2026
In Pyrrhic Symphony, the speaker asks, “Should a poem be the pill or the pharmacy?” And the book replies: Why not both? It ails and wails, blooms and wilts, but always breathes, just as anyone reading this does. Part siren songs, part torch songs, Pyrrhic Symphony sings wry lullabies for apocalypses public, personal, and politic, moving from cruise ships to Krakatoa, from a dentist’s office to a marriage as it explores how love, family, community, and art can function in the face of an increasingly hostile climate. And in lamenting how “all I ever wanted from love / was that it never change,” the feverish speaker goes toe-to-toe with the nurse who watches over him as they encounter and recount a world of late capitalist excess. By turns ecstatic and demonic, tender and terrifying, Pyrrhic Symphony stands as an act of musical witness and cautious hope in this age of corrupted wonder.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496247919
ISBN-10: 1496247914
Pagini: 84
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496247914
Pagini: 84
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Prize and the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in AGNI, the Believer, the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, ZYZZYVA, and in The Best American Poetry. Davis is cocreator and host of the podcast Poetry Goes to the Movies, and of its digital collection for the Poetry Foundation.
Extras
Natural Histrionics
The lights of the world were going out
and I was going out with them.
So I said to hell with it
and walked on full of hellfire & fluoridated water—a
missile of dumb confidence under the sun’s sadistic
vespers.
Dark fell fast.
Birds gave way to bats. The moon’s black yoke above
a big bit of nothing.
No light, just implacable night.
Soon enough, I found myself in a fix:
quicksand cooled my Quixoticism.
I sank.
Not fast but subtle—a
drowsy shimmy
into an underworld of allomorphic rock.
There, I fumbled among fossils for a while, then quit—my
history finally natural history.
The truth is
we’re never alone.
The earth is fully peopled
with people. When the lights of the world went out
I went out with them
and though you’ll never hear this from me now know
that all I ever wanted from love
was that it never change.
Anthropocene Cool
Nurse, tell me what you deserve and I’ll give it at my expense.
Give me enough
string and I’ll twine your desire to its fruit.
So long as its fruit
is me.
Otherwise, go indigent & handsome on your road.
Go crimson & unpronounceable, your cosmology porcine & gasket,
your grief an incandescent cancer that conjugates all joy
into loss—your
congregation curtained
as a circus must be to protect its profits from payless eyes.
Likewise,
we’re curtailed by pretension, unappreciated by everything
from maharaja to messiah, mulberry bush
to song about it.
We wander grass-fed
boutiques of jussive
animals like Victorian pensioners, twirling umbrellas
& in lace, calling the lion old-fashioned,
long-in-
tooth.
Nostalgia confers
narcissism like a tree.
So we sit in the audience of that circus, suspect & brigand,
like a magazine so estranged from its congressman
that it falls out of circulation.
So we smile & show
the barcode of our teeth.
So we run.
So we run.
Blown out like a bride on a beach, all bluster & white,
the sky armored with birds & secular as a tomb
given to tourism.
Pyrrhic Symphony
Nine months now of news that is not news.
There has been weather
& there has been food.
On the horizon, cruise ships
still crewed, their white dream of hospitality gone silent
as the sun.
Nothing to do.
Nothing to do. I sit patient as an animal
in its zoo.
My rage fixed like a fascinator on my head.
Here on the wholesale Pacific,
the electronic doors of electronic stores go untroubled.
The wind is against us and the supermarkets are full of people
hoarding frozen pizza.
The freeways are quiet.
Birds are on the move.
The sky is a color the sky hasn’t been
in a century.
Still we long to get back to business.
To buzz & branch out.
To beat any price,
honor any coupon . . .
all while the kids Jeremiah’d on gigs
fetch us supper,
swooping like bats from business to home & back.
Nurse, will you think less of me
if I tell you I hurt—that
fear pulls through me
like a needle drawn by a magnet?
That my blood is haunted by the memory of rain?
That when I was a child I watched a house burn down
without thought of the people inside it?
That while they were being refugeed in a country
so fixed on wealth
that car crashes promise not only neck brace but windfall
I thought only of a cup
of ice-cold
milk?
I will never know what happened to them.
And they will never know I write this
thirty-five
years later,
still warm with the memory of their home’s immolation:
fire bright against the blackening frame,
the desert reverent around it,
so quiet you could hear the sand
crackle as it turned to glass.
I recall a light rain tapping on the temperance of my skull
as between the fire and my five-year-
old
self
a warm hand of wind ran its fingers over the entire state
of Arizona to ask,
How you doing?
& then, before anyone could answer,
Hey, have a nice day.
The lights of the world were going out
and I was going out with them.
So I said to hell with it
and walked on full of hellfire & fluoridated water—a
missile of dumb confidence under the sun’s sadistic
vespers.
Dark fell fast.
Birds gave way to bats. The moon’s black yoke above
a big bit of nothing.
No light, just implacable night.
Soon enough, I found myself in a fix:
quicksand cooled my Quixoticism.
I sank.
Not fast but subtle—a
drowsy shimmy
into an underworld of allomorphic rock.
There, I fumbled among fossils for a while, then quit—my
history finally natural history.
The truth is
we’re never alone.
The earth is fully peopled
with people. When the lights of the world went out
I went out with them
and though you’ll never hear this from me now know
that all I ever wanted from love
was that it never change.
Anthropocene Cool
Nurse, tell me what you deserve and I’ll give it at my expense.
Give me enough
string and I’ll twine your desire to its fruit.
So long as its fruit
is me.
Otherwise, go indigent & handsome on your road.
Go crimson & unpronounceable, your cosmology porcine & gasket,
your grief an incandescent cancer that conjugates all joy
into loss—your
congregation curtained
as a circus must be to protect its profits from payless eyes.
Likewise,
we’re curtailed by pretension, unappreciated by everything
from maharaja to messiah, mulberry bush
to song about it.
We wander grass-fed
boutiques of jussive
animals like Victorian pensioners, twirling umbrellas
& in lace, calling the lion old-fashioned,
long-in-
tooth.
Nostalgia confers
narcissism like a tree.
So we sit in the audience of that circus, suspect & brigand,
like a magazine so estranged from its congressman
that it falls out of circulation.
So we smile & show
the barcode of our teeth.
So we run.
So we run.
Blown out like a bride on a beach, all bluster & white,
the sky armored with birds & secular as a tomb
given to tourism.
Pyrrhic Symphony
Nine months now of news that is not news.
There has been weather
& there has been food.
On the horizon, cruise ships
still crewed, their white dream of hospitality gone silent
as the sun.
Nothing to do.
Nothing to do. I sit patient as an animal
in its zoo.
My rage fixed like a fascinator on my head.
Here on the wholesale Pacific,
the electronic doors of electronic stores go untroubled.
The wind is against us and the supermarkets are full of people
hoarding frozen pizza.
The freeways are quiet.
Birds are on the move.
The sky is a color the sky hasn’t been
in a century.
Still we long to get back to business.
To buzz & branch out.
To beat any price,
honor any coupon . . .
all while the kids Jeremiah’d on gigs
fetch us supper,
swooping like bats from business to home & back.
Nurse, will you think less of me
if I tell you I hurt—that
fear pulls through me
like a needle drawn by a magnet?
That my blood is haunted by the memory of rain?
That when I was a child I watched a house burn down
without thought of the people inside it?
That while they were being refugeed in a country
so fixed on wealth
that car crashes promise not only neck brace but windfall
I thought only of a cup
of ice-cold
milk?
I will never know what happened to them.
And they will never know I write this
thirty-five
years later,
still warm with the memory of their home’s immolation:
fire bright against the blackening frame,
the desert reverent around it,
so quiet you could hear the sand
crackle as it turned to glass.
I recall a light rain tapping on the temperance of my skull
as between the fire and my five-year-
old
self
a warm hand of wind ran its fingers over the entire state
of Arizona to ask,
How you doing?
& then, before anyone could answer,
Hey, have a nice day.
Cuprins
[These lines, nurse, are for you.]
Natural Histrionics
Anthropocene Cool
Pyrrhic Symphony
The Nurse on the Nature of Silence
Self-Portrait as Beehive
Abstract Birth
The Nurse on National Prayer
Future Tense
Tornado Debt
The Nurse on the Consumer Abstract
Infidelity
Nabisco Theology
The Nurse on Domestic Language
Mutiny by Fish
The Nurse on the Theory of the Self
The Last Dream of Water
This is a Test
The Nurse on the Reality of Air
Notes from the Republic of No
The Halloween Habit
Self-Portrait as the Interstate Highway System
Underworld
Soft Manifesto
The States
Pyramid Dream
To Whom It May Concern
The Aspirin Age
The Nurse on Westward Expansion
Insect Chorus
Some Ghost
The Nurse on the First Dream of Fire
Terminal Felicity
Stations of the Crossed
Self-Portrait as Parable
The Goodnight Rules
Omaha Divorce
Notes
Acknowledgments
Natural Histrionics
Anthropocene Cool
Pyrrhic Symphony
The Nurse on the Nature of Silence
Self-Portrait as Beehive
Abstract Birth
The Nurse on National Prayer
Future Tense
Tornado Debt
The Nurse on the Consumer Abstract
Infidelity
Nabisco Theology
The Nurse on Domestic Language
Mutiny by Fish
The Nurse on the Theory of the Self
The Last Dream of Water
This is a Test
The Nurse on the Reality of Air
Notes from the Republic of No
The Halloween Habit
Self-Portrait as the Interstate Highway System
Underworld
Soft Manifesto
The States
Pyramid Dream
To Whom It May Concern
The Aspirin Age
The Nurse on Westward Expansion
Insect Chorus
Some Ghost
The Nurse on the First Dream of Fire
Terminal Felicity
Stations of the Crossed
Self-Portrait as Parable
The Goodnight Rules
Omaha Divorce
Notes
Acknowledgments
Recenzii
“Pyrrhic Symphony is wild, whip-smart, and irreverent—a maximalist elegy for late capitalism and ecological disaster, set to a beat both comic and catastrophic. It’s part Muriel Rukeyser, part Anne Carson, with a dash of HBO satire and TED Talk dystopia. Its central conceit—a series of poetic ‘dispatches’ from a world breaking under the weight of its own consumption—is sustained across dazzling poems like ‘Future Tense’ and ‘Anthropocene Cool.’”—Rowan Ricardo Phillips, poetry editor for the New Republic and author of Living Weapon
“Adam O. Davis writes with elegance and grace, as if he, too, is surprised by what his unfettered mind conjures—and, with us, he is shaken by his younger self’s curious coldness and his final meditation on empathy and disconnection. The title poem is symphonic, emotionally complex, and rewards rereading.”—Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them and The Fears and 2026–27 Texas Poet Laureate
“One must surrender to the music of Adam O. Davis’s Pyrrhic Symphony—ear vibrating with plosives and rhyme, and the mind stumbling song-drunk just behind. Music here is also medicine, and a poem is ‘the pill or the pharmacy.’ It’s an old word, pharmakon, meaning that which kills and that which cures, poison and panacea both. Can one die of a diagnosis? I don’t know—but I do know these poems are the mythic medical chart of contemporary America, a country that no longer has on the cupola of its capital the goddess Curiosity, but instead, a windvane Nurse. Davis knows we need a nurse, here where ‘the supermarkets are open all night and the honeybee is dead.’ Fever burns out the germ, and the syllables of these poems pitch us past blood-heat, kill or cure, I’m not sure, we’ll just have to wait and see. But such poems can be our good, strange caretakers, a dose of hope to help us understand our helplessness.”—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Wind-Mountain-Oak: The Poems of Sappho
“Adam O. Davis writes with elegance and grace, as if he, too, is surprised by what his unfettered mind conjures—and, with us, he is shaken by his younger self’s curious coldness and his final meditation on empathy and disconnection. The title poem is symphonic, emotionally complex, and rewards rereading.”—Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them and The Fears and 2026–27 Texas Poet Laureate
“One must surrender to the music of Adam O. Davis’s Pyrrhic Symphony—ear vibrating with plosives and rhyme, and the mind stumbling song-drunk just behind. Music here is also medicine, and a poem is ‘the pill or the pharmacy.’ It’s an old word, pharmakon, meaning that which kills and that which cures, poison and panacea both. Can one die of a diagnosis? I don’t know—but I do know these poems are the mythic medical chart of contemporary America, a country that no longer has on the cupola of its capital the goddess Curiosity, but instead, a windvane Nurse. Davis knows we need a nurse, here where ‘the supermarkets are open all night and the honeybee is dead.’ Fever burns out the germ, and the syllables of these poems pitch us past blood-heat, kill or cure, I’m not sure, we’ll just have to wait and see. But such poems can be our good, strange caretakers, a dose of hope to help us understand our helplessness.”—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Wind-Mountain-Oak: The Poems of Sappho
Descriere
Pyrrhic Symphony investigates how our increasingly compromised planet is mirrored in our societal estrangements and how love, family, community, and art can function in the face of an increasingly hostile climate.