Grace

Author: Michael Davidson

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil (2025)

Grace is a manner, an aesthetic of tact, but to navigate an ableist world also requires tactics. Michael Davidson has perfected a postmodern lyric whose deft shifts in tone and syntax parse a changing present in which climate crisis and social media coincide with aging and gradual deafness. His poems register how it feels to enter “the social/as a stave of differences.” And though they document the “catalogue of affect” that arises from embodied difference, they also aim to meet error and misunderstanding with generosity and crip wit. Reading Grace, I’m reminded that “language has no solitude” when a poet is this good.