Grace is a manner, an aesthetic of tact, but to navigate an ableist world also requires tactics. Michael Davidson has perfected a postmodern lyric whose deft shifts in tone and syntax parse a changing present in which climate crisis and social media coincide with aging and gradual deafness. His poems register how it feels to enter “the social/as a stave of differences.” And though they document the “catalogue of affect” that arises from embodied difference, they also aim to meet error and misunderstanding with generosity and crip wit. Reading Grace, I’m reminded that “language has no solitude” when a poet is this good.
     Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten By a Man


Michael Davidson’s acclaimed work in disability studies takes a deeply personal turn in Grace, whose sharply chiseled lines and stanzas “chronicle a period of gradual hearing loss that began in the mid 1990s and continues into the present day.” “[W]hat is left when sound dies” leads to what he calls “a poetics of error”—“big not pig, / cat not hat,” “’A’ becomes ‘F’,” the articulation of sound in words disappearing into a “drone [that] captures silence in its slithery net.” Swimming in the ocean, which for years has been a regular part of Davidson’s life on the coast of Southern California, becomes “paddling down to the littoral . . . tuning on that low drone [that] locks the body into itself.” That body becomes “a hollow” in which “words flower (follow) as if you are having a conversation with yourself.” Other “matter[s] of attention” appear in other poems—“the baby bombed in the hospital”; “March / . . . full of loss, first L / then T now M / their thisness / pressed between leaves / a variable life”; the “algorithm / [that] tells you what you need”; the “miracles” one sometimes gets to see in nature (“owl guarding its nest / next to the lagoon / whimbrel pecking in sand”). All of this and so much more made present in the “hard surface” of Davidson’s language, which variously “embraces all the flaws,” makes Grace must reading for everyone who cares about our precarious condition in the world as well the “news,” as Williams called poetry, “that stays news.”
    Stephen Ratcliffe, author of m o m e n t


“Between the motion/And the act/Falls the shadow,” wrote T.S. Eliot long ago. In Grace Michael Davidson explores this shadowy intervening space with less drama and, in my opinion, more grace than Eliot did, looking for what connects and disconnects us. When we converse, for instance, we don’t simply exchange words. It’s also the case that:

…………silences
must be inspected for what must not
be mentioned, but considered
for the conversation to continue.

Clearly this is a tricky, delicate business. Davidson, who has experienced and adapted to severe hearing loss, knows quite a lot about inhabiting the gaps between speech and understanding, or, as he puts it,”…the hiatus before the image.” Like Creeley, he has heard “words full of holes.” It is the job of the poet to attend to such spaces and Davidson does this masterfully. Grace speaks to this moment when, it seems, we are all losing the ability to hear one another. It may be my personal favorite among Michael Davidson’s numerous books.
    Rae Armentrout


Few poets incite in me such measured quiet as Michael Davidson, who lends in this collection his signature voice to agile rumination: what does it mean to reposition oneself in regard to the materiality of language as access to that material shifts? Through descriptive engagement and lyrical association—which may vibrate differently in readers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing—Davidson recounts with patience the fickle nature of sonics and the intimacies therein. These poems balance insight and erasure from within the intellectual and emotional generosity of vulnerability; Davidson has created in Grace a stunning blend of both attention to and desertion of sound, weighing equally what is lost and what is gained.
    Meg Day, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level


Michael Davidson fulfills the promise of ‘a new knowledge of reality’: a ghostly “audiogram” of deafness, deftly conjuring poems of incarnate difference.  His “fall into language” is both a failing and flailing into grace. It is raised: a social body.
    Charles Bernstein