The Last Beast We Revel In

Coming April 1st, 2025!

The Last Beast We Revel In coalesces around love for one’s romantic partner, family, community, and the natural world. As the Appalachian Mountains enter their most recent chapter of environmental catastrophes and abuses, the need to discover joy within the human and greater-than-human community is essential. Through these poems we travel with black bear, brook trout, the old tunnel mines, summer rivers, the carcasses of meth houses, and the sweetness of August tomatoes. These poems balance revery, mourning, lust, and love while wading the rivers and meandering the deep hollows of Appalachia’s enduring landscape.

Noah Davis’s first collection, Of This River, won the Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Southern Humanities Review, Best New Poets, The Christian Science Monitor, Orion, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, North American Review, Poet Lore, and River Teeth, among others. His work has been awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the 2018 Jean Ritchie Appalachian Literature Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University. Davis earned an MFA from Indiana University and lives with his wife, Nikea, in New England.

After felling every beetle-blighted ash on the ridge

we lie down while moth wings beat
the window like children’s hands
and I cup the egg of your ankle
bone in my mouth, now safe
from shattering.

Bee Heart

We bend like a serviceberry branch
heavy with a honey swarm. A thousand
humming hearts on a single branch.
How can we refuse such bending?

from The Last Beast We Revel In

Our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers
left us mountains shorter than they were given.

They stood in front of the downed chestnuts
and sawn hemlocks for pictures, like they were posing

on Easter in front of a church. They carried coal
into the day and said the dark beneath the earth

had a weight of its own, that hell’s probably not full of flames,
but a place where all the light in the world recedes behind you.

These are poems that love the world. The humans, plants, and animals, “who we have named and who have named us,” are integral to every line. Every shadow in this book and every light, every death and every joy is felt and loved by that mutual naming. And so, the world Noah Davis holds open for us is full of love, and is an intimate world even as it is an expanding one.
—Leah Naomi Green, author of The More Extravagant Feast, winner of the 2019 Walt Whitman Award 

Noah Davis seeks out the animal-self in poems that never shy from the messy territories of the erotic. Time is the axle this book spins around—future and past losses exist alongside the present-tense pull of language, of the sacred and the flesh, of landscapes observed and imagined. I celebrate the ardor these poems cling to, all the equally grand and understated ways The Last Beast We Revel In stakes its claims for human connection against the backdrop of our increasingly cynical age.
—Michael McGriff, author of Eternal Sentences, winner of the 2021 Miller Williams Prize

I love when Noah Davis makes a line because he is also making a world, a town where mining companies paid men to blow the tops of mountains off. Davis remakes those mountains through careful attention to the flexibility of language. These poems of the heart were dug out of the ground where bears, crows, rivers, and deer are carved into the land and the speaker’s body until we encounter body-land, land-body.
—Tyree Daye, author of Cardinal

96 pages
Noah Davis
Pub date – April 2025
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN: 978-1-960327-10-9
Emerging Voices in Poetry