Bleed Through

The best of Davidson’s forty-year career, these poems grapple with larger philosophical questions through the sieve of language and form.

Ghost texts—the overheard conversation, the remembered line, the daily paper—clamor to enter the poems in Michael Davidson’s Bleed Through. Here, the page is a plane for working out aesthetic problems, engaging the reader’s intellect and love of beauty. Each new word or phrase calls forth another; attentions create their own nimbus of associations. Davidson’s poems are a kind of battleground, where larger philosophical questions are grappled with through the sieve of language and form, but they are also a response to the vital use people make of everyday speech. Faced with hearing loss, he questions the acoustical models—voice, ear, rhyme, rhythm, text—upon which poetry depends and takes as his subject the problems and questions of our cultural history.

Publication date: December 3, 2013

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 8.25

Page Count: 256 pages

ISBN: 9781566893398

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Michael Davidson is a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of several critical works, including Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics and Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, and five books of poetry, most recently The Arcades in 1998.

“Davidson has created in Bleed Through a beautiful balance between vulnerability, wit, and critique that is utterly entertaining and insightful.” 

—Arcadia Magazine

“Bleed Through is a book we have needed for a very long time. What a joy to have it in hand.”

—Ron Silliman

“Michael Davidson refuses to treat history, philosophy, and the lives we live as separate phenomena. The language of intimate experience interrupts that of public atmospheres and vice versa. These poems—many from rare and out of print books—converse as lucid shocks under a critical sun.”

—Jena Osman

“Across a lifetime in poetry, Michael Davidson has plumbed the relationship between the ordinary and the uncanny, and the timeless and the timelessly amusing, within this all-too-mortal coil. It is a pleasure indeed to hail his accomplishment.”

—Michael Palmer