The Desire Line

Sven Davisson's first full length collection of poetry The Desire Line is a textual and photographic meditation on memory and impermanence. 



We now live in an unprecedented world of images. The gilt icon of ages past, the altar triptych with its eternal dramatis personae, was a singular awe-inducing experience. Modernity as encapsulated in the endless reproducibility of images and words has given rise to a new magical landscape, personal and pagan in its fetishism. Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, "All photographs are memento mori". They capture an instance in time that will never occur again. Living or dead, the faces that look back at us from family snapshots are no more. Time has moved on, that fractional moment is past. Every photograph is an evidentiary exhibit of impermanence, itself impermanent as light slowly fades that which light and chemistry created.

Sven Davisson's poetry is a bracingly unique combination of Buddhism, eroticism, urbanity, mythology, and modernity. Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O'Hara all seem to speak again through him. --Jeff Mann, author of Ash: Poems from Norse Mythology