Coat Thief

Praise for Coat Thief

Like walking meditations, the poetic feet of Jeffrey Davis's Coat Thief invoke mindfulness through grounded, regular movement. Profoundly attuned to the beauty of daily existence, these poems upend and expand conventional perceptions of magnitude as they give prominence to sneaker prints, earthworms, egg cartons, and other often unnoticed objects. These are poems filled with wonder, poems that demonstrate over and over that we need not rely on esoteric experience for transcendence-because it is, we learn from Coat Thief, the ordinary that is most extraordinary. Yes! It is possible for poetic feet to connect our soles and souls more intimately to the earth, and with Davis, the closer we are to the earth, the closer we are to the divine.

The quiet moments of a life can be the most revealing and yet the ones we pay attention to least. Jeffrey Davis slows down the mind- camera in Coat Thief to linger in those moments with a focus always rich with compassion, empathy, and physical touch. I love his intention. I love his sound.

We are accustomed to poems that seek political change by deploying fierce urgency and by speeding up time to get us moving toward progress. But if the poems in Jeffrey Davis's Coat Thief are good evidence, then the most effective, and affective, poems of change may be those poems that slow time down and bless us with moments in which we are able to perceive emotional complexes in instants of time, moments that leave us stupendously awake in the dark: an earthworm churning through the detritus of civilizations; wasting your morning speaking to a blue stone that is just beginning to hear you; a mother and the child kicking inside her with a god's foot.