By Robin Davidson

Winner of the 2013 Richard Snyder Memorial Book Prize

Available from:  Ashland Bookstore |  Amazon

Praise for Luminous Other by Robin Davidson:

Robin Davidson's work is deeply engendered, and she writes of ordinary women--rooted in earth, reaching for light--caught between personal, social, and historical forces. She is a learned poet--her verse rings with the work of photographers, painters, and other poets--who understands the work of poetry to bring light of darkness and music out of silence. She is a poet of harsh luminosity, spiritual alertness, who has been growing into the fully realized artist she was always meant to become.

- Edward Hirsch

These beautiful, wise and moving poems live in the shadow of history and art. They inscribe a contingent world where, as the sign above the "Main Street Fire Sale" reads, "New losses arrive daily." In the face of such inescapable loss, the speaker of another poem is prompted to ask the question that haunts all human life: "How can I sing when I know / I will die?" And the answer comes back as another question, the only answer there can be: "When I know I will die, how can I keep silent?" Luckily for us, Davidson can t keep silent; she sings.

- Susan Wood

Davidson s poetry is masterfully Modernist insofar as it re-envisions a shattered world by projecting new coordinates of order and meaning; it is also importantly historical because it bears witness as a literal bearer and translator of the memories and perceptions of a multiplicity of public and private histories; it is world-bound, like a Greek temple, in its amazing ability to illuminate the material reality of the non-human within the human context in which we work, love, suffer, hope, and die; it is finally and insistently spiritual in its deft capturing of the inherently spiritual significance of the sensual world. If Heidegger were alive to review her work, he would say that Davidson is among the rare poets who are able to illuminate the holy by setting the earth into the world.

- Tammis Thomas --Praise for Luminous Other

"Winter Litany" appeared on Verse Daily
Listed by Piotr Florczyk at the top of his favorite reads of 2013

About the Author

Robin Davidson, born in Trieste, Italy to American parents, holds a BA in French from the University of Texas at Austin, and MA and PhD degrees in creative writing from the University of Houston. Her poems and translations have appeared in such American literary journals as 91st Meridian, AGNI, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, The Paris Review, Poet Lore, qarrtsiluni, Tampa Review, Words Without Borders, as well as Fraza, a Polish literary journal based in Rzeszów, Poland. She is the author of two chapbooks, Kneeling in the Dojo (Finishing Line Press) and City that Ripens on the Tree of the World (Calypso Editions). Davidson served as a Fulbright scholar at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and her book The New Century: Poems by Ewa Lipska, translated from the Polish with Ewa Elzbieta Nowakowska, appeared from Northwestern University Press. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship in translation, two Houston Arts Alliance awards in poetry, and the Abiko International Poetry Prize in Japan. She currently teaches creative writing as an associate professor of English for the University of Houston-Downtown.