Coat Thief - Softcover

Jeff Davis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0996523138 ISBN 13: 9780996523134

Publisher: Saint Julian Press, Inc., 2016

Synopsis

Praise for Coat Thief

Like walking meditations, the poetic feet of Jeffrey Davis's Coat Thief invoke mindfulness through grounded, regular movement. Profoundly attuned to the beauty of daily existence, these poems upend and expand conventional perceptions of magnitude as they give prominence to sneaker prints, earthworms, egg cartons, and other often unnoticed objects. These are poems filled with wonder, poems that demonstrate over and over that we need not rely on esoteric experience for transcendence-because it is, we learn from Coat Thief, the ordinary that is most extraordinary. Yes! It is possible for poetic feet to connect our soles and souls more intimately to the earth, and with Davis, the closer we are to the earth, the closer we are to the divine.

            ~ Melissa Studdard, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast

The quiet moments of a life can be the most revealing and yet the ones we pay attention to least. Jeffrey Davis slows down the mind- camera in Coat Thief to linger in those moments with a focus always rich with compassion, empathy, and physical touch. I love his intention. I love his sound.

            ~ Kazim Ali, Sky Ward

We are accustomed to poems that seek political change by deploying fierce urgency and by speeding up time to get us moving toward progress. But if the poems in Jeffrey Davis's Coat Thief are good evidence, then the most effective, and affective, poems of change may be those poems that slow time down and bless us with moments in which we are able to perceive emotional complexes in instants of time, moments that leave us stupendously awake in the dark: an earthworm churning through the detritus of civilizations; wasting your morning speaking to a blue stone that is just beginning to hear you; a mother and the child kicking inside her with a god's foot.

            ~ Brian Clements, author of Disappointed Psalms and A Book of Common Rituals

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffrey Davis researches, interviews, and works with creative innovators, scientists, and social psychologists to discover how creatives flourish in times of challenge and change.

He is author of the nonfiction book The Journey from the Center to the Page: Yoga Philosophies and Practices As Muse for Authentic Writing (Penguin 2004; Monkfish Publishing, 2008) and the poetry collections City Reservoir (BarnBurner Press) and Coat Thief (Saint Julian Press 2016). His essays, articles, short stories, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. He has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Woodstock's Byrdcliffe Artist's Colony and served for several years as fiction editor for Tiferet Journal. 

He writes an online column on the science of creativity for Psychology Today and The Creativity Post and also heads up the renegade team at Tracking Wonder Consultancy that helps business artists shape books, brand strategies, and intentional lives. He lives with his wife and their two little girls in a farmhouse in the Hudson Valley of New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Saint Julian Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0996523138
• ISBN 13: 9780996523134
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92