Bleed Through

Early access copies available in August Endorsements (potential): Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Elizabeth Willis, Jena Osman Promotion: ALA Annual, BookExpo America, Twin Cities Book Festival, MLA, AWP, Heartland Fall Forum Targeted pitches: Poets & Writers, The Writer’s Chronicle, Publishers Weekly, Poetry, Jacket 2, Triple Canopy, Guernica, Cabinet First and Second serials: The Nation, The Boston Review, The Awl, American Poet, Book Forum Advertising: Bookforum, The Poetry Project Newsletter Promotion to coincide with Davidson’s frequent speaking engagements at universities and poetry centers as well as readings in Poland, Spain, and the UK. Promotion on Coffee House Press e-newsletter, website, and social media channels Promotion via electronic postcard to Davidson's contact list

The best of Davidson's forty-year career, these poems grapple with larger philosophical questions through the sieve of language and form.Ghost texts--the overheard conversation, the remembered line, the daily paper--clamor to enter the poems in Michael Davidson's Bleed Through. Here, the page is a plane for working out aesthetic problems, engaging the reader's intellect and love of beauty. Each new word or phrase calls forth another; attentions create their own nimbus of associations. Davidson's poems are a kind of battleground, where larger philosophical questions are grappled with through the sieve of language and form, but they are also a response to the vital use people make of everyday speech. Faced with hearing loss, he questions the acoustical models--voice, ear, rhyme, rhythm, text--upon which poetry depends and takes as his subject the problems and questions of our cultural history. From "The Second City": in the second cityI live out the dream of the firstliving neither for its access and glamour nor dying from its disregardsimply talking towards the twin spiresof an ancient cathedrallike a person becoming like a person