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.
 

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

Noah Davis’s first collection, Of This River, won the Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Southern Humanities Review, Best New Poets, Orion, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, North American Review, and River Teeth among others. He lives with his wife, Nikea, in Missoula, Montana.