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And I will now tell you
a little bit about Adam

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who we're thrilled is back
here in Tucson with us.

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And it's a pleasure that he's
back in this part of the world.

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If you've spent any time
with Adam's collection,

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his first collection, the
Index of Haunted Houses,

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you'll know that his
distinct pleasure

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and how language veers
towards possibility and song

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permeates the book.

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You can feel the poem's
frequent delight,

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and assonance, and
alliteration as they

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work their way down the pages.

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What the poet Timothy
Donnelly calls language

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that is unleashed.

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Let loose from what fidelity's
language might harbor

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for the banal
plodding forward that

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may typify most of its days.

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And so instead, in Adam's
book, you get riffs like this.

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"Winter is a gaunt gimlet,
insomniac in sand,"

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or "upon alkaline lakes, we
skate on alkaline skates.

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In ermine, the eel eats
the eggs of each oak tree.

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I eye the exit out into
the taxi-infested night."

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In other moments, he sees
things with razor sharp

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clarity as if he's working
over the occasion for a poem

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with a jeweler's eyepiece,
getting the moment

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and full dimension into language
like this, "an ant farm in ruin

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is an abacus of rain," or
this description of a Gideons'

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bible at a Motel 6,
"bibles loam unopened

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in the boredom of
bedside tables,

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patient little
loaves of leather,

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black in their theaters
of compressed sleep."

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All this language work,
the stunning scene

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against the backdrop of
ghosts and hauntings,

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it is the Index
of Haunted Houses.

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This happens in the
doubled life where

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the present is both the
life into which history

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and lived experience culminate.

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And simultaneously,
in a Davis poem,

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where the tools
of meaning making

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start to spread out,
become larger, linger

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and resonate far beyond
the initial instances

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that give rise to them
in the first place.

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Eileen Myles, the
poet, was just here.

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And their selected
poems is titled,

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"I Must Be Living
Twice," hinting

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at the possibilities of
poetry to increase, to double,

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or to triple us by squeezing
the world into language,

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and then giving those
language-y diamonds to us,

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earnestly, reader by reader
by reader by reader, however

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far a poem might travel.

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This is increase not in the
way a capitalist might dream

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of, but instead,
the kind of increase

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that a ghost might dream of.

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And this is what
Davis's work shows

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us, what sticks when the
moment is gone and why.

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The Index of Haunted
Houses reminds us

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of this essential truth that
most of what animates our lives

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is how we attend
to what haunts us.

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The public and private
hauntings, the good

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and the bad, the things
that stick and persist,

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far beyond the little stuff
that loads up our days

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and dominates our calendars.

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What matters are the ghosts.

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Please help me
welcome Adam Davis.

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