Pam Davenport writes in the deserts and mountains of Arizona and earned an MFA at Pacific University in Oregon. She writes poems to look for what is shimmering beneath the ordinary, as Lucy Brock-Broido recommended. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Nimrod, Tinderbox, Poetry of the American Southwest, Chiron, New Verse News, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and others.

Books by Pam Davenport:

Other poems on the web by Pam Davenport:
"Amanita Phalloides"

About A Midwest Girl Thanks Patti Smith:

"I admire this compendium of a chapbook, with its moon and its horses, its cowbells and mushrooms and breasts. These odes form the record of an American life, from childhood to late middle age, helter-skelter in their enthusiasms, exultant in their femaleness."
—Joseph Millar

"The poems in Pam Davenport's debut collection, A Midwest Girl Thanks Patti Smith, are as earthy and spirited as the horses she describes. Whether it's a teenage girl longing to be 'felt up,' or the 'flesh and pith and skin' of an orange, Davenport writes with honesty and wit about the nature of desire. 'We want we never stop wanting,' she writes in the poem 'Sushi.' Part coming of age story, part love song to appetite, these poems abound in rich physical detail. There are spider plants, rump roasts, martinis and bottles of Prell shampoo. Davenport celebrates the sublime and the ordinary in equal measure, from the moon's 'ancient lunar light' to 'a rusty chain-link fence.' A Midwest Girl reminds us what a gift it is 'To know we are here.'"
—Ellen Bass