“Interstate Highway System” by Alumnus Adam O. Davis '06 Selected for 'Best American Poetry 2021'

"Interstate Highway System," a poem by alumnus Adam O. Davis '06 recently published in The Believer, has been selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2021 by alumna Tracy K. Smith '97. After being notified of the selection, Davis took to Twitter to say, "this news made my year." Read more of Davis' poetry here. 

Davis recently received great praise for his poetry collection, Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), which won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and was listed by Publishers Weekly as one of "15 New and Forthcoming Indie Press Gems." Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lighting (Yale University Press, 2012) and the first Latino recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, said of Davis' poetic voice, "Time and again I was pulled in, kept close to the collisions between the self and the passage of time which populate [his] poems. The beauty of the language engenders intimacy. The reader easily steps into the text. The wonderful imagination of this poet reminds us, the mind—lyric space—is an astonishing nexus." Index of Haunted Houses is available for purchase here.  

 In a recent interview with Kenyon Review in which Davis discusses the pandemic, poetic inspirations, and poetry's potential, he said, "For me, the social function of poetry is to remind people of what they once knew but somehow forgot—to shock them (“afresh, afresh, afresh” as Larkin once wrote) into feeling, being, and living through unexpected syntax, language, and punctuation...Our conservatism with language isn’t innate but ingrained through years of education and my job as a teacher and a poet is to disrupt this graining by reminding students and readers alike that they once had to determine for themselves what the world was for them—and they’ll have to do so again."

Best American Poetry 2021 will be available in September. Read an excerpt from "Interstate Highway System" below, courtesy of The Believer. 

Interstate Highway System 

In the beginning, I was 
incorporate, plain as skull,
 

in cahoots though inchoate: 
a suit suited to combust—
 

my body a blunderbuss 
brandished in traffic bright 

as dogbite. I drifted like sand 
under the wind’s hand, saw 
 

supercells & speed traps, 
saw God in the face of a forest 
 

fire. The sky was froth, 
the land foment: ichor & ozone,
 

bee swarm & wildflower—
every living thing shivering 
 

under the long-range bellow 
of the transnational semitruck. 
 

Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize (Sarabande, 2020). His work has recently appeared in Boulevard, The Literary Review, New American Writing, and West Branch. The recipient of the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, he lives in San Diego, California.

Tracy K. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Wade in the Water (2018). In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate.