Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    All fours
    All fours
    All fours
    Ebook80 pages50 minutes

    All fours

    By Nia Davies

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Bodies. Rhythms. Motion. Sounds. All fours is a debut collection of poetry from Nia Davies, a book of rituals in language that stalk the space between what is uttered and what is meant. These poems are haunted by the strange traces of the longest words in the world and folk-mythic figures such as Sinbad, Eurydice, Mossy Coat, Pan and Baba Yaga. They pose riddles with multiple or mysterious answers. A swerving sweary jump into a terrain that is both comically musical and perplexedly political, All fours speaks of the (mis)adventures of sex and human communication, a life full-to-bursting with burning questions.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateJul 3, 2017
    ISBN9781780373652
    All fours
    Author

    Nia Davies

    Miriam Nash was born in 1985 in Inverness and grew up in Scotland, England and Wales. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and graduated with an MFA in 2014. She has performed her work internationally, and brought poetry into schools, museums, mental health organisations and prisons in the UK, USA and Singapore. She was the first Writer in Residence at Greenway, Agatha Christie’s summer home, as part of Writing Places with the National Trust, Literature Works and The Poetry Archive. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, and her pamphlet, Small Change (flipped eye), was published in 2013. She received an Eric Gregory from the Society of Authors in 2015, and was runner-up for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2016. Her first book-length collection, All the Prayers in the House, was published by Bloodaxe in 2017.

    Related to All fours

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      nothing so lonely as the hospitalbed. nothing so lonely as beinglonely in the hospital bed. nothingso jargoned as the body sproutingbrush tuber cannula or rue. nothingso pure as the abstracted by which Imean exploded body, the body thatholds its skin

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Elizabeth Strout

      May 6, 2017

      The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge returns with a story collection, Anything Is Possible, about war, personal trauma and class divides

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      May 1, 2023

      At the end of the world, I sat in the dark waiting for you,but you didn’t come. You didn’t save me. At the end we are always alone, candles slowlyburning out, losing the flame for lack of oxygen. You didn’t tell me it would be like this. All of itcam

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Dec 7, 2021

      The facts sit in an ordinary room. They resemble people:stubborn and without imagination. The facts begin to chatter: Better days coming, better dayscoming. They arrange themselves in the shape of a lie. They’re cheating: they only work in the past t

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      Sometimes I feel like I’m writing the scorefor a film that doesn’t yet exist, but everything that will happenin the film will happen to me. Is this what they call plot? This dailypicking up of the same things— glasses, coffee cup, pen, book, keys—and

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Paris Review

      Dec 7, 2021

      EDITOR EMILY STOKES SENIOR EDITOR LIDIJA HAAS MANAGING EDITOR AMANDA GERSTEN ASSISTANT EDITORS LAUREN KANE, OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING POETRY EDITOR VIJAY SESHADRI ART EDITOR NA KIM DESIGNER MATT WILLEY CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MAYA BINYAM, MATTHEW HIGGS ADVISO

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Hilltop

      Dec 7, 2021

      Returning to the very same place,let it be a hilltopwith a view of the night city where once you used to be,when your “whole life”still lay ahead of you,when everything was before. Returning—when it’s already after:irrevocably, decisively.What a stra

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Speaking the Unspeakable

      Sep 27, 2024

      Speaking the Unspeakable
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      for Brenda Shaughnessy The news isn’t good, and neither of us feelslike pretending, though the list of what we hope forgrows longer by the day. More news, goodor otherwise, everything witnessed by the lightof fires, and something we cherished alwaysb

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      i look like someonehealing from an accidentbecause i am someonehealing from an accidentthe book of actsscales falling from saul’s eyesremembering my capacityfor stillnesshow long can i sitwithout looking awaythe fear of god escapingi desperately need

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      There are not enough hours in the day before I have to perform affection. That’s an objectively robotic thing to say, my therapist tells me, when I speakabout my responses to sentimentality. My weekly battle with the laser printer—a kind of intimacy,

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Letter from Lafayette Square

      Dec 7, 2021

      One Sunday in February my mom telephones at eight in the morning to remind me that the bishop of Maryland is coming to Saint James at Lafayette Square, the African American Episcopal church where I was baptized and confirmed. There will be a single s

      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Maya C. Popa

      Mar 9, 2021

      There is not one leaf left on that treeon which a bird sits this Christmas morning, the sky heavy with snow that never arrives,the sun itself barely rising. In the overcast nothingness, it’s easy to feel afraid,overlooked by something that was meant

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems by Rohan Chhetri

      Sep 8, 2020

      All summer the half voice lurked behind me & I played deaf for days for to live To not write about it to use my body Part the river’s flesh to operate Machinery is human too to love & for once stay awake through it all. Now it comes like the deer sle

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      What now? You’d flown infrom a Midwest city namedfor its rowdy summertimeabundance lying saying youwere coming to visit friendsin San Francisco and I had takenthe train from chilly Oaklandto meet you and we rode northcarefully not touching I took you

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 3, 2019

      You are old when your longtime friend Melvin, turned seventy-five, writes you in rage about becoming old. … Melvin knows nothing about old age: Melvin can walk upstairs! Melvin flies to the West Indies with his girlfriend and his wife! In your eighti

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Casey Gerald

      Dec 14, 2018

      There’s a line in my book that reads, “I have been so many things along my curious journey: a poor boy, a nigger, a Yale man, a Harvard man, a faggot, a Christian, a crack baby (alleged), the Spawn of Satan, the Second Coming, Casey.” My reading tend

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Lording

      Jun 14, 2022

      It’s 4:38 P.M., eight minutes after I usually go home, but now I’m rooting around under my chair cushion, double-checking my shirt pocket, hunting for an unmarked baggie of white bars, which I shouldn’t have left in my office, which I shouldn’t have

      17 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems by Cynthia Cruz

      Jun 15, 2019

      I would like this poemto be a machine.Concise, metallic,a counting apparatus.A means to keep each momentcontained and fixed, akinto a series of Polaroids,photographed and fixedto cardboard or some otherpaper-panel backing.Then photographed and affixe

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems by Sara Gilmore

      Sep 10, 2024

      Mad as only an angel can bethe angel’s lip curls like a dog’smad to make an angel curlof their angel lip, mad to dogmad to the third rail the angelrides beside on the stupid angeltrain, spreading their angel kneesso you can’t sit down. That angelis m

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Winslow, Kois, Tóibín, and More

      Jan 17, 2023

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new release titles from De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Dan Kois, Colm Tóibín, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to he

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Quarantine Morning

      Dec 7, 2021

      Climbing the stairs, slowly, on my palmsand soles, bent far forward, I seemy shins closer than usual—their indigo and red-violet fireworks,their royal-blue wormholes—how much difference is there, anymore,between me and a cadaver?I know I won’t come,

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón

      Dec 14, 2022

      U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2022

      A prayer begins & endseach meeting, it starts with the word God& ends with the word difference. The difference, as far as I can tell,between what is offered & what is possible is a chasm. At times it seemswe simply run out of places to be, until we c

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Strange As The Rules Of Grammar

      Dec 7, 2021

      The two or three times I saw Lil Waynehanging out at the Praline Connection in New Orleans he had a mouth full of blingcovered in forkfuls of greens or green beans or white rice & red beans on a tongueof strange lucrative grammar The answer will be t

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Loquats

      Dec 7, 2021

      In the spring they ripen and swarm the trees,the waxy little fruits that resemble bald heads. I collect their remains: piebald, sweetand sour. A syrup made of loquats is said to cure cough. Their woolly twigssplinter in pear blight. I am bereft when

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Kate Zambreno

      Dec 12, 2019

      I am at this point in my life where I find these lists voluptuous brags about time, which I have surely been party to in the past. The post A Year in Reading: Kate Zambreno appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for All fours

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      All fours - Nia Davies

      You will never guess my name

      for Elizabeth Hamilton Watts

      About me

      Because I was sleeping all over here,

      and here. The magnesium intake nightly,

      the slosh of the road in the distance.

      Heaven had already soiled me.

      Who’s that scaling the terraced garden?

      I opened one eye in the dark,

      then someone braver opened both.

      I made to swing out of a lime tree,

      said deepen, foster. Thought of when I was young,

      I would think selkies, think skerry calf.

      I would listen through lids,

      less scathing, less scrape and tangle.

      An alarm sounded and everyone ignored it.

      Mossy Coat

      I wanted to live out of party bags and dream daily in bread-making references. I wanted to write about haunted sties and brown trousers, the look of champagne on your face, the look of rate-nice/right-nice.

      I would write about sealing practices, I said. I wanted Ermintrude, or any woman by that name, to come to my party.

      I thought how I’d like pieces of his muscles to keep for the night, I wouldn’t waste them.

      And of course I thought about Mossy Coat. She singles out the bad men, the ghosts from the guests, hears Baba Yaga’s distant rumble.

      I wanted the bad man to come back and fetch me. I wanted a loom as a bed. I said my time with me should be limited. I wanted masochistic dressing-up mode.

      I wanted furlongs of him. And pussy was a word I could think about – ‘Pussy’ ‘Cunt’ / ‘Mossy’ ‘Coat’. Or maybe a rap on the word ‘sundress’.

      I couldn’t think about ‘I’ anymore, it was bad for me, so I thought about him all dressed up like a pig-herder or a mountain lion.

      And about wedges and my moccasin-together-look with a heel, Look Pocahontas, Look! But I wasn’t sporting either. Instead I still hadn’t put my trousers

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1