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Jon Davis is the author of six poetry collections that have been called ambitious and political, a way to reconcile the irreconcilable. Scrimmage of Appetite received a 1998 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and Davis is also the recipient of the G. E. Younger Writers Award, as well as the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His newest collection is Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Since 1990 Davis has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He occasionally appears as the street poet Chuck Calabreze.

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Four Poems

by Jon Davis
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Portrait of My Mother, 1957

You want to remember this. But why? Your mother,
hospitalized for depression. The doctors recommending—
No, that’s the adult version. In the child’s version,
there’s no mother, then there’s a mother.
She looked off,
into the distance. She must have looked off
into the distance as if there were something to find
there. That could explain it.That staring

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