[07/01/25] Davis, Marissa: End of Empire

Penguin Books, paperback

Publication Date: July 1, 2025

Publisher Marketing: From a prizewinning poet whose work "points to unfathomably bright future for the canon" (Danez Smith), a stunningly lush collection about desire, mythology, and our fraught and ecstatic relationship with the natural world A collection as remarkable for the force of its feeling as for the range of its vision, End of Empire explores personhood, and especially Black womanhood, within an ecological framework. Inspired by the language and landscape of the poet's rural Kentucky hometown and the ways that inherited religious and political narratives shape our relationships with our surroundings and ourselves, these poems reckon with the ways the speaker, their body, and their natural and ideological surroundings continously remake each other. Formally dynamic, emotionally resonant, and and rich with biblical, mythological, and historical allusions, these are elegant, impeccably crafted pieces that evoke the fearsome power of nature and of the tangled, sensual self.