In Climbing a Burning Rope, John Paul Davis focuses his peculiar imagination, philosophical lyricism, and misfit spiritual outlook on life in the hypercapitalist twenty-first century where the inscrutable logic of algorithms haunts our constantly connected selves. Celebrating the weird and wild, lamenting wounds and weariness, Davis's poems carve out a space in which we can reclaim what is sacred and be reminded to keep something of ourselves for ourselves.
"Set in a world of quarterly growth targets, global warming, mergers and acquisitions, and neurotoxins, Climbing a Burning Rope is a delightful exercise in humanizing the drudgery. John Paul Davis centers the worker-the grocery bagger, the line cook, the company man irritated by the word learnings-in imaginative, engaging poems that defy both late-stage capitalism and a faith imposed in childhood.
