" Club Q is an elegant, unsparing book of inquiry, where ‘curiosity / is the recognition of ignorance / as a kind of sickness.’ One eyebrow cocked, queer as fuck, James Davis lays bare our various longings to connect, and the attendant absurdity: men in a hotel room who ‘shared a queen / and left no stain’ the internet that, ‘like water, / transmits the smell of blood in all directions.’ This droll and formally promiscuous poet lets ‘desire // italicize our somberest sentiments.’ It’s hard not to love this nerdy, sexy, vulnerable first book." Edward Hirsch, from the judge's foreword I’m eager to invite you to a new democratic venue, which is now open: Club Q." James Davis has a fresh voice and a witty, inclusive mission, and it gives me great pleasure to welcome this book into the world. Military base … In this book, we can trace some of the ways that a misfit kid who once sat in tears in silent protest grows up to become a gay man looking for a way to transcend his isolation and find community. But his virtuoso formal strategies only partly succeed in hiding the pain of a lonely, misunderstood childhood growing up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, dogged by malls and megachurches, shadowed by a U. I like the way it nods to Wallace Stevens and James Merrill, who claimed that he was ‘as American as lemon chiffon pie,’ and takes wordplay at its word, mining the language to see what it will yield … James Davis loves shimmering surfaces, linguistic games. It is also flamboyantly gay, the queerest of queer poetry books-it keeps finding closets to shred-and takes special pleasure in its literary outings and exposures, its urban scenes and outposts. It is cleverly conceived, formally deft, musically resourceful. Club Q is a place where 'Heaven is a chorus boy… if you are very good, you might get him for Christmas. It is a powerful, playful book that catalogs the precise imprecision of our human situation. "The book is in part a quest or query of the quotidian, guided by formalist play with the sestina, self-portraits, persona poems, terza rima, and references to spelling bees, Scrabble clubs, bingo, and arcades. Learn more about the book at Waywiser's website.
Proudly named after a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Club Q is a collection of poems selected for the 15th Annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize by Edward Hirsch and published by Waywiser Press in Fall 2020.