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Distributed for CavanKerry Press

The Last Beast We Revel In

An unflinching look at the intimate, dwindling natural world and our desire for human connection.

Noah Davis’s The Last Beast We Revel In coalesces around love for one’s romantic partner, family, community, and the natural world. As the Appalachian Mountains continue to suffer from environmental catastrophes and abuses, the need to discover joy within the human and greater-than-human world is essential. In these poems, we travel with black bears and brook trouts, exploring old tunnel mines, summer rivers, the remains of meth houses, and tasting the sweetness of August tomatoes. Davis’s poems balance revery, mourning, lust, and love while wading the rivers and meandering through the deep hollows of Appalachia’s enduring landscape.
 

88 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2025

Emerging Voices

Poetry


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Reviews

These are poems that love the world. The humans, plants, and animals, “who we have named and who have named us” are integral to every line. Every shadow in this book and every light, every death and joy in it is felt and loved by that mutual naming. And so, the world Noah Davis holds open for us is full of love, and is an intimate world even as it is an expanding one.
 

Leah Naomi Green, author of The More Extravagant Feast, winner of the Walt Whitman Award

Noah Davis seeks out the animal-self in poems that never shy from the messy territories of the erotic. Time is the axle this book spins around—future and past losses exist alongside the present-tense pull of language, of the sacred and the flesh, of landscapes observed and imagined. I celebrate the ardor these poems cling to, all the equally grand and understated ways The Last Beast We Revel In stakes its claims for human connection against the backdrop of our increasingly cynical age.
 

Michael McGriff, author of Eternal Sentences, winner of the Miller Williams Prize

I love when Noah Davis makes a line because he is also making a world, a town where mining companies paid men to blow the tops of mountains off. Davis remakes those mountains through careful attention to the flexibility of language. These poems of the heart were dug out of the ground where bears, crows, rivers, and deer are carved into the land and the speaker’s body until we encounter body-land, land-body.
 

Tyree Daye, author of Cardinal

Table of Contents

After felling every beetle-blighted ash on the ridge
How Blood Becomes the River
Places Familiar
The September Side of Light
Poem Found on Three Springs Run
I Ask What We Are
Heron Heart
Appalachian Lust Song
Mountain Salve
Conception
Trout Heart
Portrait of the Beloved with Rain
What I Hear as Crow Song
Genesis
On the last day of rifle season
Penance
Telling My Beloved What I Lost on the Mountain
Arguing Again in the Afternoon
Hound Heart
Poem Sewn into My Hunting Jacket
In April with my beloved

Prayer for the People Who Pulled the Mountaintops Back Like a Fingernail
With My Beloved Upon Waking from a Nap in a Field a Week Before the First Haying
July Drought
Tick Triptych
The morning after my mother saw my beloved and me sleeping in the same bed
Mercy Song
March
My Brother and I Watch Dogs Chase Trains Over the Pig Hole Bridge
In Bed with My Beloved and an Elk Leg
Human Heart
I like to believe
Wedding Poem
Poem Sewn into my Briar Pants
Solstice Bluegills
Here, Long Before My Father’s Death
Pink Lady Slipper
Mother
Bee Heart
My Beloved Asks
Marriage Poem
From the valley
God came to me on County Road 26
Think of Lips and What Earth Needs for Vegetables
My brother fought
Dream with My Beloved and Honeycomb Ending with a Line from Yeats
My father gives me a knife

The Last Beast We Revel In

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