When I Drowned

-Gary Lemons, author of Snake

Part ghost story and part love story, these lyric poems wade deliciously near a Victorian aesthetic. The dead understand love can haunt "good as any ghost." Water becomes a sinister thing "without a proper mind." Unique and powerful, this book, the images and stories within, will linger like a chill.

-Michael Schmeltzer, author of Empire of Surrender

When I Drowned plumbs our most intimate relationships to measure domestic drownings daily endured-mother and daughter, anima and animus, lovers, the living and the dead. In language intensified by hydrostatic pressure, she conjures the people and spaces where "strangers share our sleep" in sapphire light. It is a "republic of secrets" she elevates, brought to the surface by a feminine spirit as "sleek as an open thigh," "goddess fleshed," and clear-seeing underwater.

-Kathryn Hunt, author of Seed Wheel

When I Drowned is engaging, masterful storytelling. When we talk about voice concerning some poets, we are assessing their aesthetic style, but that is far from the truth when I read Lauren Davis poems. In her beautiful and haunting narratives, consider "voice" as the character speech of Davis's personas. The protagonist are archetypes, and they speak for themselves. Their language is unique as they are, and I am wonderfully transported to those places, and times, where they live.

-Gary Copeland Lilley, author of The Bushman's Medicine Show

Davis is one of those rare poets who can create a new world in a poem and then flip that world on its head with a single line. Using the sparest of language, these poems are explorations of loss and yearning, and surveys of the various ways the soul can thirst even in landscapes defined by water, even with "mouths full of water." When I Drowned is a triptych of beautiful anguish.

-Denton Loving, author of Crimes Against Birds