End of Empire

Praise for the work of Marissa Davis:

“[Davis' is] a voice so varied and skilled one has to step back to see that the work is not that of a great, anthologized generation but of one stellar talent singing all the choir parts perfectly, wildly. The embodied poetics found in My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak exist brightly in the canon of Black femme poets . . . Davis is ‘prepared to swallow flame’ and anyone picking up this chapbook should be prepared to do the same.” —Danez Smith, author of Homie, Cave Canem’s 2019 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize Judge's Citation

“I was so taken with the sweep and splendor of Davis’s quiet cataclysm of a poem that I invited her to read it for The Marginalian, which she kindly did — a lovely voice that surprised and invigorated me with its audible youth, only amplifying the poem’s atmosphere of possibility and its wondrous, defiant commitment neither to look away from a broken reality nor to cease cherishing this astonishing world in its brokenness.” —Maria Popova, author of Figuring