Leopold's Maneuvers: (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

In the venerable tradition of caregivers writing about the healing arts - a tradition peopled by the likes of Anton Chekhov, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, and Denise Levertov - Cortney Davis brings to poetry the experience, insight, and compassion of a nurse practitioner who daily confronts the unexpected frailties, passions, and power of the flesh. Taking the body as her text, Davis crafts her poetry from the pains of labor and the joys of birth, the depredations of disease and the sustaining hope of recovery. She trains her clear, unflinching gaze on the unfolding scene - a woman shipwrecked with a stranger; an adult reinventing childhood; an ill woman rediscovering pleasure in her body; a nurse realizing, in one harrowing instant, that she is as vulnerable as her patients - unerringly finding the particular image, the human detail, that connects reader, writer, and subject with the world. Primal, compelling, intelligent, these poems show us how to see as clearly as the poet does, with empathy and grace.

About the Author :
Cortney Davis is the author of a poetry collection, Details of Flesh, co-editor of two anthologies of creative writing by nurses, Intensive Care and Between the Heartbeats, and author of a memoir about her work as a nurse practitioner, I Knew a Woman: Four Women Patients and their Female Caregiver. She lives in Redding, Connecticut.

Review :
"The poems in Cortney Davis's astonishing new book Leopold's Maneuvers grip us with the adroit, knowing hands of the wise woman. Whether tending to the battered woman whose face 'is like a peach / left in the refrigerator drawer too long,' or touching a dying surgical patient's heart, noting 'How clean the body was, split open,' Davis unerringly and courageously addresses our suffering, and offers us the joyous possibility of healing." Rafael Campo, MD, author of The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry "The nurse-poet writing this collection doesn't flinch from the horrors she sees, but neither can she 'brush off horror like salt.' Harsh and beautiful, these poems are acts of spiritual survival, one woman's necessary testimony, one woman's witnessing." Peggy Shumaker, author of Wings Moist from the Other World "[Davis's] work transcends all adjectives, locating itself in the complexity and mystery of human existence. These poems bypass poetic trends and leap directly in to the hard facts of birth, sex, and death."Jeffrey Skinner, author of Gender Studies