A Rare But Possible Condition holds at its center an inescapable question: what happens when you lose everything? The collection opens with the proverbial “before,” inviting readers to the altar of the everyday, where children forage summer fruits, the dictionary tells stories, moving boxes are sealed up, and poems are whimsy. When the everyday is reduced to ruins in the wake of coming out, the speaker has to decide what’s next. The book makes no resolution, only a resolve to fall into Something Greater.

“In A Rare But Possible Condition, Alison Davis braids capacious curiosity with raw vulnerability. Intimate with Elizabeth Bishop’s art of losing and Adrienne Rich’s wrecks, Davis writes from the aftermath of disasters of a ‘love, which has so many strange / hands and absolutely no sense of decorum whatsoever.’ This moving debut is driven by a hungry spirit of inquiry and a reverence that stands ready to kneel before each ordinary river’s miracle. Reaching across unknowable distances to a stranger, a brother, a daughter, a friend, a lover, Davis writes with bone-deep knowledge of the flawed and fleeting nature of all our bonds yet still dares to plead ‘mispronounce me but say me.’”

—Bronwen Tate, author of The Silk the Moths Ignore