Comp.

Recipient of the Poetry Center Book Award, 2000

Published last fall, Comp. is already enjoying a reputation among readers of "alternative" poetry as a book that is both humorous and political, informed and elegant yet colloquial and engaging, with little or none of the suspicious misgivings—that the "moment has passed," that the syntax/society homology is no longer relevant, or that cultural capital accrues as readily around experimental work as that of the "mainstream"—that have greeted much recent writing in the Language vein. Davies, a native of Canada but a resident of New York since the late 1980s, published his only other full-length book, Pause Button, in 1992. While his style has changed somewhat since then, both books share a heightened concern for a heterogeneity of expression, an Olsonian interest in the line by breath (or at least in the various freedoms and maximal rhetorical gestures), and a pinpoint accuracy of tone and reference—which justifies the long wait between the two. – Brian Kim Stefans, The Boston Review

Reviews

Stefans at The Boston Review on Comp.

Clover at The VLS on Davies

Writing Class in Kevin Davies’ Comp.

What gets me is

                                        the robots are doing
                                   my job, but I don't get
                                        the money,
                                   some extrapolated node
                                        of expansion-contraction gets
                                   my money, which I need
                                        for time travel.