Chad Davidson

Could the shlock-rock '70s band Kiss in any way affect the outcome of a death-dealing twenty-first-century virus? Is Bob Ross—that permed, inimitable painter of Edenic nostalgia on PBS—actually an emissary from the land of personal loss? Might the work of Edward Hopper reflect facets of a global plague? What is the grammar, finally, of grief, of isolation? The essays in Chad Davidson's Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year mainly concern the loss of the author's father directly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which the pandemic itself provided a strangely ideal backdrop to grieving. Refracted through the kaleidoscopic, yet strangely stagnant, isolation period in the first year of COVID, his father's death—another plague visited on the author—found its way into all his waking hours, coloring whatever he tried to write, particularly when he tried not to let it. Friends both lost and nearly so, the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, even the seemingly inconsequential discovery of a rash of chew toys in the yard: these events assumed an unmistakable gravity, considered in the midst of a pandemic and the ruins of personal grief. Bring Out Your Dead adds Davidson's father to the growing list of loved ones lost in—and, in this case, right before—the pandemic. It's a personal memorial, given over to a father's memory and the grief endured while living through dueling plagues (one viral, the other psychological). In the end, the book becomes more about the ways we eulogize, how we remember those who are gone, why their memories persist, and what summons them back into our thoughts, our language, and our lives.

Twenty-seven years in the making, Terra Cognita chronicles the author's continual travels—and problematic (if still, at times, ecstatic) encounters—in the "bel paese." Across nine richly evocative essays, Chad Davidson investigates the seemingly never-ending fascination that travelers have with Italy.As much a meditation on what home and away mean as it is a travel memoir, Terra Cognita finds literary predecessors such as Dante and Italo Calvino crowding in alongside more accustomed sights from travel shows, Hollywood films, and tourist guides. Though each essay departs from a particular location in Italy and remains rooted in the author's own history there, the book ultimately becomes less about those places and more about the placelessness any such journey can engender, how—even after flying across an ocean and landing in a foreign country—we are still hopelessly and fully ourselves.

In From the Fire Hills, poet Chad Davidson shows us an Italy that is far from the romanticised notions of sun-drenched fields and self-discovery. Instead we see a maelstrom of chaos and contradiction, a place where the frenetic pace of modernity is locked in a daily struggle with recalcitrant history.This autobiographical collection explores the myriad ways in which Italian culture survives its own parodies and evokes a modern ferocity that harkens back to Italy’s barbarian past. As the narrator, rendered vulnerable by language, embarks on his journey, lines of location, time, and perception blur. From the siren song of Dante’s grave to the heights of San Luca, from streets where policemen with Uzis tread a hair’s breadth away from the macabre remains of Capuchin monks, Davidson’s Italy is a study in contrast between the contemporary and the classical, the sacred and the profane. Within these poems sensual and savage revelations unfold, exposing new, uncanny, and often uncomfortable spaces to explore in this well-travelled realm of Western imagination.Throughout the volume loom “the fire hills”: the scorched mountains of Sicily in summer; the memories of Italians living near the Gothic Line outside Bologna, where the Germans dug in and received heavy bombing at the close of World War II; even the wildfires igniting the San Gabriel foothills in southern California; all the way back to the burning city of Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid. As the ash settles and the smoke clears, we realise that what we remember is often just remains, shells, and burned out wreckage, as if there were another type of memory.

This title explains how to read, interpret and write about the world around us in a critical and informed way. How well are you able to decode the signs that surround us in our daily lives? All of us, consciously or unconsciously, are constantly engaged in the act of reading and interpreting the signs in the world around us. This book answers the needs of students of composition, rhetoric, creative writing, stylistics or literature: it provides a process orientated guide to analyzing anything. Fraser and Davidson teach the reader how to perform semiotic analysis and formulate in plain language a logical set of instructions on how to write it up. The central idea is that analytical writing can be performed on any kind of text. The authors move from theory to practical analysis, featuring sidebars throughout that expand on relevant points. There is a clear trajectory through research, planning and writing with concrete revision strategies. The book includes links to insightful and witty readings on its expansive Companion Website, together with a Lecturer Handbook, extra material and additional essay tasks. This is the textbook of choice for all students of writing.

This title explains how to read, interpret and write about the world around us in a critical and informed way. How well are you able to decode the signs that surround us in our daily lives? All of us, consciously or unconsciously, are constantly engaged in the act of reading and interpreting the signs in the world around us. This book answers the needs of students of composition, rhetoric, creative writing, stylistics or literature: it provides a process orientated guide to analyzing anything. Fraser and Davidson teach the reader how to perform semiotic analysis and formulate in plain language a logical set of instructions on how to write it up. The central idea is that analytical writing can be performed on any kind of text. The authors move from theory to practical analysis, featuring sidebars throughout that expand on relevant points. There is a clear trajectory through research, planning and writing with concrete revision strategies. The book includes links to insightful and witty readings on its expansive Companion Website, together with a Lecturer Handbook, extra material and additional essay tasks. This is the textbook of choice for all students of writing.

Writing Poetry combines an accessible introduction to the essential elements of the craft, with a critical awareness of its underpinnings. The authors argue that separating the making of poems from critical thinking about them is a false divide and encourage students to become accomplished critics and active readers of poetic texts.

This title juxtaposes themes of popular culture and apocalypse. ""The Last Predicta"" is Chad Davidson's searing collection of poetry dedicated to endings of all varieties. From odes to the corporate cornucopia of Target and the aggressive cheer of a Carnival cruise, to emotive examinations of Caravaggio's ""The Calling of St. Matthew"" or flies circling a putrescent bowl of forgotten fruit, Davidson weaves a lyrical web of apocalyptic scenarios and snapshots of pop culture.Throughout the volume appear cataclysms large and small, whether the finality of a minute passed or the deaths of a thousand swans at Seneca Lake in 1912. Images of King Kong, Starburst candies, and the Brady Bunch swim with mythological figures, Roman heroes, and dead animals as Davidson deftly explores the relationship between the mundane and the profound. At the center of the collection sits the Predicta television itself, 'the lives blooming there in Technicolor,' at once futuristic and nostalgic in its space age prophecy.Moving in their very simplicity, these poems resonate with discoveries that belie their seemingly ordinary wellsprings. Chad Davidson's stunning collection repeatedly explores the moment of revelation and all its accompanying aftermaths. ""The Last Predicta"" leads readers to ponder all manner of predictions, endings, and everything that follows.