In his seventh poetry collection, Jon Davis exhibits the range and mastery that is the result of fifty years of study, teaching, and practice. Above the Bejeweled City opens and closes with homages to Federico Garcia Lorca’ s dream-struck ballad “ Romance Soná mbulo.” In between, he inhabits what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “ inexplicable existence” that marks our passage here on Earth.


Part absurdist, part satirist, part tender correspondent, Davis writes in the slipstream of writers like Joyce, Beckett, Parra, and Plath. In an age that calls out for hopeful verse, Above the Bejeweled City offers, instead, a treatise on defeat and despair— and on how letting go is a way of holding on.