Bruise Songs by Steve Davenport

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Bruise Songs by Steve Davenport

Steve Davenport’s Bruise Songs is aggressive – 21st century blues, a rap for the times, a hymn for the hurts we bear and for which we recover.  As the poet invokes in ‘Dear Horse I Rode in On,’ his poetryis the curl of rindthe lick of salt the shavesbarkings of all these linesor limes I cut and squeezefor bruise songs, my cowboybrag.  Rhyme is everythingin song.  You done me wrong.He leads us to muddy waters where he asks us to sing his ‘two-chord, carp killin’ river song,’ or gives us access to love letters to cerebral angiograms:  ‘I find the clot you leave under the bruise.  I ask that you open lines of time.’  It takes a life to sing blues so hauntingly.