Under What Stars

Ryan Davidson’s male protagonists are affable and messy as Charles Bukowski’s, if only Bukowski left Los Angeles more often. From Hong Kong to Venice, Harlem to Belgrade, readers will be introduced to a string of love affairs: the Sarahs of many continents. In the vein of Tony Hoagland, Davidson’s poems are tangential gestures that both tell a story and transcend the subject. The poems aren’t just about the girls themselves, but where they fall in and out of place and time.

Review: Prick of the Spindle Review: Spectrum Culture

Praise

"Davidson's poetry is like the moment before an orgasm, that blink of time, sustained for 74 pages. And every page is worth the wait."

-- Harmoni McGlothlin, Notes & Grace Notes

"A Ryan Davidson poem moves erratically, with admirable faithfulness to his thought's tempo. The lines veer, halt, speed up, and then surrender to a voluptuous neutrality. Self-abasement is this wanderer's terra firma. His cracked, casual tone-wistful but also stumbling - has the melancholy charm of David Schubert's. I enjoy these poems because of their irreducible strangeness, and because they don't forget that art is an accident."

-- Wayne Koestenbaum, Hotel Theory

"Ryan Davidson is, in the most positive sense of the word, alienated. A native of Scotland but a longtime resident of America and a world traveler, in his poetry he is always an expatriate—an engaged, bothered outsider mastering a new dialect even as he longs for a home he can never quite locate. “I think I left home,” he writes, “to go home to start a new home / or something equally improbable.” If he is at rest anywhere, it is in his stance of urgent ambivalence—his commitment to explore, in acute detail, the uncertain summons of place, nation, knowing, desire, and romance. In his brave attempts to connect over the borders and barriers that separate us, he proves himself a truly international writer, a poet of promise and grace."

-- David Groff, Theory of Devolution