The Last Predicta (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)
"Chad Davidson’s beguiling poetry sweet-talks us as well as it bites.  His is both the charm of a poet who can fit everything from NASCAR to Caravaggio on his silver tongue, and the despair of a poet who’s “seen the moon open its hinges like a jaw and shut. Shut up. Shut down.” These poems are sharp enough to cut through the din of our lives and burnished enough to cast an exuberant light on us while doing it."—Terrance Hayes, author ofWind in a Box "WithThe Last PredictaChad Davidson continues his war against the bland and predictable by conjuring an exotic alternate world of intellectual daring, wit, and verbal brilliance. He possesses the rarest sort of imagination, able to locate subterranean connections among the most disparate fragments of ordinary life, to identify the spirit's secret survival even in the blinding light and shallow recesses of contemporary experience. What we want from art is the life within life, and these poems take us there."—B. H. Fairchild, author ofEarly Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems“These poems cover great distances, both literal and figurative, as Davidson searches for value among ‘the slogans of the dispossessed.’ ‘Was there never the remotest chance/of becoming purer’ he asks, a question that drives the book’s inquisition of American culture.  While the question is never answered, it seems to me posed, again and again, by the poet’s clear desire to see to the inside of things, in fluid lines that draw me into the rhythm of Davidson’s expansive vision.”—Bob Hicok, author ofThis Clumsy Living“The Last Predictais like a broadcast from The End of something: a culture, a time, a language, a world. This one. If the picture seems to roll, it’s our eyes, our brains, straining to keep up with Chad Davidson’s madcap velocity, the mordant blur all the world is washed in. ‘This is weird,’ one poem suggests, and any apocalypse would be, but in Chad Davidson readers could hope for no better guide.”—Paul M. Guest, author ofMy Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge"InThe Last Predicta, Chad Davidson imagines a shopping list for the Apocalypse—only to reveal that our cupboards are already fully stocked: “low-sodium transubstantiation,” “the Milano-style whatnot,” a “Golden-Clad Something Nice,” and the strangely Greek “augur of instant replay.” The shoppers cum lovers in these poems—dressed in “desire’s burrs and foxtails”—visit Target, Tokyo, Rome, Gold’s Gym, and the late night nature shows on television, where they find, ultimately, “the silent spreading/ ocean’s black pajamas, saying,Nighty-night, nighty-night.”—Angie Estes, author ofChez Nous