Books

I am an unconventional writer who combines quirkiness, tenderness, and vulnerability in my exploration of love, physicality, identity, and self-exploration.

My books include The Language of Fractions (Moon Tide Press, 2023), The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press, 2016), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Circe (Low Brow Press, 2011).

My latest book, Penguin Noir, is available from Livingston Press.

New Releases

Praise for Penguin Noir

Penguin Noir offers “a view of life under a man-made ego-system,” The Sea of Wonders, in which poet Nicelle Davis queries the implications of preserving (penguin) lives when the world that would support them is becoming unlivable and our relationship to them increasingly mediated (“So many images of nature, we struggle ever to make it outside”). Wry, yearning, exasperated, this play-in-verse with bold paintings by artist Cheryl Gross and dramatic monologues of individual Emperor, Gentoo, and other penguins dares us to look penguins (and, by extension, the world) in the eye and ‘fess up to the mess we’ve made.  Sharp, eviscerating wit will keep you rubbernecking the spectacle Davis walks us through.

—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. 

Nicelle Davis’s brilliant poetry-collection-tour-de-force is like nothing you’ve read before. Combine the integral components of Penguin Noir––part dark cultural fable, part eco-documentary, part Ars-Poetica, part voyeur love comedy––and you have “multiple points of entry” into a suicidal “shine of extinction” story the narrator can’t stop telling herself. This poetry noir unveils a screenplay structure of listed characters, inciting incidents, rising actions, and a prologue-to-epilogue journey that relies on wry wit, wild visual motifs, and an unnerving narrator’s imperative. Not since Animal Farm have we experienced such energized and unexpected “showmanship of disasters,” or “quirk of apex predators,” between man and animal, man and Earth, man as penguin and himself. Good/bad, hero/villain, foils, ghost-guns, bloody eggs, and performing dolphins all amuse and horrify under the same allegorical sky. After all, “apathy’s the real villain” in this pornographic tragedy of powerplay, but just when “the brightest birds have gone out like god's candles,” or when “you felt lost at your own front door,” Davis reminds us that the “motive for murder/is always life” and the “impossible love [the artist] sees in everything.”

                                    —Elena Karina Byrne, author of If This Makes You Nervous

Praise for The Language of Fractions

Nicelle Davis’s The Language of Fractions is unlike anything else I’ve ever read — quirky, unsettling, and almost impossibly tenderly human, unflinching from the flesh and blood and bone of us and yet comprising an extended love poem of rare and fluent delicacy. Every startling turn seems ultimately inevitable – a poem that begins with the profane declaration, “I’ve become a priestess of bowel movements,” ends in lyrical synesthesia, “How am I to hold the fragrance of rain with words?” Here is Eros, physical love, romantic yearning, and here is motherly love, and here is the wish to map/un-map the self. Sometimes darkly hilarious, sometimes ravishingly poignant, these poems are beautifully strange, and strangely beautiful.

—Cecilia Woloch, author of six poetry collections, including Sacrifice, Late and Carpathia

In The Language of Fractions, Nicelle Davis proves once again that her imagination is limitless. Every poem, each idea is drenched with contagious energy, inspiration, and originality. Daringly surreal, vibrant and alive, this collection demands a new adjective be created: Nicellian. Fall into these poems and relish the freshness and creativity in this rare and Nicellian voice.

—Kim Dower, Award-winning poet of 5 collections former City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood.

Past Publications

In the Circus of You is a deliciously distorted fun house of poetry and art by Nicelle Davis and Cheryl Gross.

The universe of this book is one in which dead pigeons talk, clowns hide in the chambers of the heart, and the human body turns itself inside out to be born again as a purely sensory creature. This grotesquely gorgeous peep show opens the velvet curtains on the beautiful complications of life.

A woman is buried so a church will rise. Nicelle Davis’s The Walled Wife unearths from the long-standing text, The Ballad of the Walled-up Wife, a host of issues that continue to plague women in the contemporary world: the woman’s body as sacrifice; the woman’s body as tender or currency; the woman’s body as disposable; the woman’s body as property; the woman’s body as aesthetic object; the woman’s body unsafe in the world she must inhabit, and in the hands of the people she loves.

The second collection by Nicelle Davis, Becoming Judas, is an “elemental bible-diary-manifesto,” that weaves together Mormonism, Mamaism, Manson, Lennon, Kabbalah, and the lost Gospel of Judas into am ecstatic, searing meditation on raw religion. Nicelle Davis is a poet with an eye towards the spiritual. Loosely based on Davis’s upbringing in the back-room of a record store in Mormonville, Utah, this unexpected fusion becomes a “spontaneous combustion” of matter turning into energy.

Praise for In the Circus of You

Nicelle Davis’ newest book mythologizes pain, making grief, anger, disgust, and fear bearable by transforming them into finely wrought poems. These poems are filled with sharp edges, dissections, illusions, and images of flight, both in their language and in the ways they occupy the page. They are perfectly matched by the drawings of Cheryl Gross, who translates Davis’ poetry into an equally grotesque, equally eloquent visual language. In the Circus of You is a visceral spectacle of controlled excess; it dismantles the three rings we use to contain our most domestic horrors and shows us the way through vulnerability to release.

—Evie Shockley, author of the new black

Accompanied by Cheryl Gross’ illustrations of stretched flesh and biomechanical anatomies, In the Circus of You writhes in a fever dream of divorce, depression, and an undercurrent of poverty. Nicelle Davis directs a cast of disfigured pigs, desiccated pigeons, and circus freaks in poems whose forms are often cinched with wasp-waisted girdles or filed into jagged angles. Never simple oddities, these afflicted characters and musical poems amount to a harrowing account of loss and how one has to fracture herself in private to appear unbroken in public. Don’t miss Davis’ acts of lurching grace and terrible beauty.

—Douglas Kearney, author of Patter

Praise for The Walled Wife

“At the heart of The Walled Wife is an old ballad about the sacrifice of a woman, by building her into the wall of a structure under construction (!!) This practice was believed to ensure the building’s completion and durability. While the poems that compose the book take inspiration from this historical source (and from subsequent commentary on it) they cast a wide net, touching on mythology, feminism, folklore, philosophy, primal fears, love, entomology, self-harm, multiple selves, and more, riffing in ingenious ways on their subject. Particularly notable is Davis’s ability to get inside the heads and suffering bodies of her characters. She mines her material with abject, reverberant humanity. Graphically inventive, and necessarily obsessive, The Walled Wife breathes new, eerie life into a disturbing ancient ritual, laying bare its many metaphors and contemporary relevance.”

—Amy Gerstler

“What does it mean to have a ‘soul in the building’? What is the space inside a wall that is also a crypt, an ‘immured’ beloved, an ‘emptiness unfathomable,’ an architecture that is also a ‘consciousness’? Nicelle Davis has created a remarkable and searing work of ‘red stains and white linens.’ Light, body, gold, silver, excrement, moon, sun, copulating finches, finitude: ‘You are not to blame for rotations,’ writes Davis. I can’t quite put into words the ache in my own bones, the pressure before weeping, that built in my own heart as I read, listened to and encountered her extraordinary work. ‘I am becoming red clay,’ writes Davis. From the inside of the book. Which reaches us. A cry. The particular mixture of longing and acute loss that returns us to our own human experience: the livid, temporary history of being here at all: on the earth.”

—Bhanu Kapil

Praise for Becoming Judas

“Nicelle Davis weaves–as one of her religio-sacred-cosmos ‘spiders’ pokes–the elemental, mother-daughter, Judas-Jesus-Lennon substances, meta-histories and neo-gospels devouring us as we disintegrate and are reborn to love this grand body-bible-book.

Hold this, if you can–devouring mind at work, singing razor-writer of stanza-line fractal syncopations into photo, interview, letter incantations; as Anne Waldman has said of her poetic conduction, ‘a new-beyond-gender fecund horizon.’ A new elemental bible-diary-manifesto, yes, and also a musical score of the spider-woman who writes in prayer ‘octaves.’ You hear voices–angels, demons, Azrael and Manson, Jesus and Judas, daughter and granddaughter–masks, sheafs, harmonies, and dissonances that few can hear, decipher, or re-magnetize through the ethers and ‘star compounds’ once our skins are stripped and hanging from the ancient suffering trees. Wait: there is Doo Wop down the highway as we careen with Nicelle’s genius magic in this grand, magnificent, luminous creation-braided-fleshspirit word book. You have to caress and then let all unravel. A cosmic whip. A mesmerizing opus, prize-winner, yes, all the way.”

—Juan Felipe Herrera, 21st United States Poet Laureate

Early Work

Nicelle Davis’s powerful debut poetry collection, Circe, masterfully chronicles the complex inner life of this all too human enchantress from Greek mythology. Primarily narrated by Circe herself, the book records her post-Odysseus “withdrawal”... Her laments are interrupted and enriched by a series of poems voiced by a bevy of canny and dangerous sirens. Their incantatory “recipes” produce a provocative admixture of visceral wisdom and sensual bravado... Circe is a deeply moving, endlessly inventive, and enlightening exploration into the terrors of abandonment, the ageless plight of aggrieved women, and the bittersweet and sustaining powers of love. Nicelle Davis has given us an entirely new and riveting version of Circe, a woman painfully scorned, whose path towards healing leads her into a greater awareness of herself.

—Maurya Simon, author of Cartographies

Nicelle Davis’ work emerges from the origins of light and fire, quickly, wildly and with cracks from which tendrils emerge, a longing for sense to be made for those left behind by Odysseus, those sirens, singing gasps of poetry. This poetry wills the reader into a time/space where light burns and language runs off the edge of the world.

—Kate Gale, author of Mating Season

“To fight the quiet, I talk to my selves,” Circe says. Nicelle Davis’s poems are the manysided chorus of that complicated character: passionate and resigned, angry and forgiving. They shimmer with Circe’s energy and despair, and, most of all, with her love: for her son, for Odysseus, finally even for his wife Penelope. Not least, Davis’s vibrant language is a love song for us, her readers and listeners, “entering me with my eye / in your palm—seeing my face, not / as a void, but a window.” —Dawn Potter, author of How the Crimes Happened “There was never enough about the sirens,” says the foreword to Nicelle Davis’s book of poems, which then remedies that omission by giving voice to the “other woman” of the Odyssey. “I thought love would swallow pain,” says Circe, whose Homeric version turns her enemies into animals. The magic in Nicelle Davis’s poems, however, is the blend of anger, regret, and love that spurs them—the complicated brew that poetry exists to make clear.

—Natasha Saje, author of Bend