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Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Book Prize
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.
Praise for Pyrrhic Symphony
“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.’”
“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.”
“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.”
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Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize
Finalist for the Big Other Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the Big Other Readers'
Choice Award
Index of Haunted Houses is an investigation of longing and belonging, of haunting as a mode of living, of history as a congress of ghosts clamoring for attention through a bad telephone connection. This is a stunning debut — one that will surprise, convince, and, most of all, delight.
Praise for Index of Haunted Houses
“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.’”
“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.’”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
"This is a collection of stark witness and testimony, with a voice that manages to sing."
—Publishers Weekly
"Davis’s Index of Haunted Houses...is part exploration, part exhumation, part exorcism, part easement. Each poem takes on different tones and personalities, revealing new layers with each reading. The book is a ghost readers will carry with them for days, and possibly years, after their first encounter."
"[Davis'] words tip-toe through their subjects, lifting objects & ideas up w the tip of a pencil; shining light into neglected corners, & as a result truly memorable phrases emerge...but when his reason slips, lines turn suddenly uncanny, revelatory, so that his mastery discloses itself as born out of inner necessity rather than pathological fear. Davis is a poet of delicate intensities."
"Index of Haunted Houses is a book that wants to make something out of the relics of the past, stretching across a fading American landscape trying to find the remnants of life that America seems to have lost. Ultimately, the collection is made of vestiges of the past: places the world’s forgotten, people that it’s left behind, haunted landscape after haunted landscape. But, like any good ghost story, Index of Haunted Houses leaves just enough room for readers to investigate for themselves."
"[Davis'] poems are perfectly dense, lyrically open and wonderfully precise, offering not a single wasted word, space or image."
"ADAM O. DAVIS’ brilliant debut is an American ghost tour that induces paroxysms of weeping, melancholia, joy, and bewilderment. Ruin and loss become as lively as the ghosts in their demand for a place in Americana."
"A debut collection of prose poetry, Davis tackles themes generally reserved for the annals of genre fiction. Everything from things that go bump in the night to disappearing and destroyed Bison, the pieces actualize how even the worst hauntings, the scariest monsters, carry their own nightmares and doubts."
—"15 New and Forthcoming Indie Press Gems” by Michael Seidlinger, Publishers Weekly
"A travelogue of haunted houses. Ghost prose poems. Foggy, nostalgic fragments that feel like both erasure and haiku. I bought this collection after hearing Davis read and discuss (in particular how he wanted to include a book within a book). This collection is one to read once the sun goes to sleep."
—"Favorite Authors (and Their Books) That I Read in 2020," Neon Pajamas
"In Davis’ debut poetry collection, Index of Haunted Houses, there is a ghost in every living room and a skeleton in every closet. Ghosts of lost technologies and underwater mortgages. Skeletons of half-built subdivisions, of recliners decomposing in junkyards, of cars abandoned by drivers who can’t remember where in the world they thought they were going. Your ghosts. My skeletons. Our monsters. In Index of Haunted Houses, they are all present and eager to tell their tales of ruin and the occasional redemption, and Davis is just as ready to tell them."
—"Column: San Diego poet Adam O. Davis thinks it’s time to face our ghosts," The San Diego Union Tribune
"Davis' calculated use of language and form means that the varied scenes feel part of each other. We feel the literal word "bones" in one poem echoed by the bones in others. Desert cities, radios, coins used as metaphors, granaries and more come up not enough to be redundant, but often enough to feel like a sort of mantra. The mysteries in Davis' work are tail lights on the sides of highways in Ohio and the oilfields of Los Angeles, they're beasts in Nebraska, granaries in a small town or ghosts in unnamed cities....Like ghosts and summer-sticky road trips alike, Davis' work pairs a timeless and creepy America with hauntings, longing and curiosity."
—"Adam O. Davis’ ‘Index Of Haunted Houses’ Takes A Roadtrip Through An American Past," KPBS