Geffrey Davis wades into the dark waters of Night Angler with the familiarity of a skilled fisherman. He knows the darkness here: divorce, addicted and absent fathers, miscarriages, daily and systemic racism. Davis’s speakers know each groove in the blackness, and know the stories that spill from each. And yet, lines in Night Angler’s poems flash like fish scales in a flashlight’s beam through the permeating darkness.

While remembering and honoring these stories, Davis makes the effort to pen and live something new. With the rush of reeds along the riverbed, “the muffled blood-/machine still knocking away,” “coyotes crying” in the night next to freed horse hooves, Davis’ book creates a symphony of love for

“the record [that shows] we invented /

one another: family—a lighted story /

set against the shadow and dawn of distances.”

Writing through and against the cyclical nature of abuse and absence, Davis’s love for his son reads as a thrashing and endlessly gentle light, shining on something that looks like hope. Towards the end of the collection, he asks, seemingly as much to himself as the reader, “Do you hear / what it means for me to sing my son to sleep?”

A book to read and reread.