A true poet. —Hélène Cixous

Praise for The Nail in the Tree

If “broken parts shine truest,” as Davis suggests, The Nail in the Tree is more than a collection of essays but a linguistic portrait of what it is to be an artist and a mother in the United States, a blueprint for how to keep creating in defiance of fear, grief, and meaning.

—Lindsey Anthony-Bacchione, Brevity

Haunting and poignant, The Nail in the Tree speaks to the fear and grief of mothers in this time of violence against children.

—Lara Lillibridge, Mom Egg Review

A poignant and poetic essay about terror; specifically, the terror that occurs when you have two children who very well could have been witness to a school shooting. It speaks to the way that life barges in on what should be the idyllic innocence of childhood.

—Elisabeth Donnelly, Flavorwire.com

“On Practice, School Buses, Hummingbirds, Rumi, and Being Led” by Carol Ann Davis marks the second segmented essay beyond the ten-part introduction and, in it, Davis indirectly weaves a tale of tragedy unspoken, noting in twenty-seven numbered sections a variety of moments of attention—to climbing into the wrong car as a child, to Rumi, to a motorboat’s distant “wub-wub,” to a hummingbird’s mistake, to the curve of the continental shelf—all avoiding the unwitnessed “terrible thing” involving a bus full of schoolchildren. Led through the moments of the unseen/unsaid, the reader can piece together the weightier subtexts: “I was also happily blind, momentarily without an eye to see them, unable to look for anything,” Davis writes.

—Chip Livingston, Newpages.com

Essays in the collection finalized for National Magazine Award, achieved Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and were named Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2015 - 2018

Atlas Hour (Tupelo Press, 2011)

In the space of a few lines, Davis has made the parallel between a shark and a baby seem utterly believable, even natural.

—Chloe Martinez, the rumpus.net

These lines, which refer not only to Rothko’s No. 1, with its nestled, almost fetus-filled, womb-like center, but to a Rothko painting of an annunciation, now believed to be lost, and inspired by Byzantine mosaics. But Davis could well be describing her own practice and process in these lines: a lapidary expression of negative capability that is uniquely arresting and full of promise.

—Lisa Russ Spaar, the Los Angeles Review of Books

One of the achievements of Carol Ann Davis’s new book is the skill with which she creates space for her reader in poems that are extremely intimate, even private. In Atlas Hour we encounter no public outcries, no odes bellowed from the mount. Instead we eavesdrop on conversations with painters, poets, and members of her family (particularly her two young sons). … Atlas Hour suggests that domestic life (even in contemporary America) is a tapestry of human feeling that exists outside place and time.

—David Broderick, Blackbird

Psalm (Tupelo Press, 2007)

Of the three writers, perhaps the most concerned with figurative and literal vision is Carol Ann Davis. “It will be hard to be done seeing,” she writes in “Distal,” one of the opening poems of her first collection, Psalm. This statement brings into sharp relief the central problem of the book: The world is full of beauty; we are going to die. In poems that span birth and death, particularly the birth of the poet’s son and the death of her father, Davis achieves a vision of the world that gazes long and unflinchingly at these truths.

—Mark Jarman, Image

Davis's debut collection posits absence against presence or the loss of a loved one against what endures, at least for now. Poems about a father's death wistfully color other poems about a son's early childhood, and each probes the nature of feeling much like the girl in a painting who ""looks into the paint/ where she was made."" These poems are jagged, employing the non sequitur, the obscure reference, and the catalog as surface rougheners… Some of the poems, while engaging, are difficult to enter; others are wrenching. In ""Grief Daybook I""--part of a series--a bereft daughter imagines herself at her father's grave as other mourners cross over her in search of someone else, and she asks: "What is the heart/ but a request?"

Recommended, particularly for academic collections.

—E.M. Kaufman, Library Journal