Allison Davis’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, Prick of the Spindle, and Speak Peace: American Voices Respond to Vietnamese Children’s Paintings. She is a graduate of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute Summer Program. Born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio, Davis lives in Columbus.

Books by Allison Davis:

Other poems on the web by Allison Davis:
Summer Contours

About Poppy Seeds:

"As the title Poppy Seeds suggests, Allison Davis's poems are hard and small and round enough to travel just about anywhere. The splendid accident and resilience of these poems force us to consider our own scattershot family histories, the inexplicable nature of the sexual attraction that drives it all, and how we live and make a living in the many places we call home. What a dark furor this work makes on the page-and, long after, in memory."
—Kathy Fagan

"This group of personal poems reminds me of a sonata mirroring the timbres of the heart: here the sweetly erotic, there the strangely spiritual; here the folk melody, there the wedding dance; here the somber night sky, there the lucid morning light; here the whimsically heroic, there the melancholic."
—Henri Cole

"In the world of Allison Davis's poetry you will hear from `the tailor [who] unstitches the alphabet' and you will see a street whose cobblestones [are] covered in pigeons: And, who is there? You will find that a 'husband comes and goes / across the waters ... while breasts swell up with sea.' And, what is the truth of this place? `When the tailor ties a knot, he's telling the truth: Davis's sensual, image-laden lines give us a feeling of another country, the old world-but it is also the place we can see all around us-if we open our eyes."
—Ilya Kaminsky