Designated Stranger by Gion Davis

Description

Preorders ship in January 2026. 

*Consolidated shipping: If an order with multiple items includes a pre-ordered item, all items will ship together when the pre-ordered item is released.

Book Description

A soul dive and a psalm, Gion Davis’s Designated Stranger spans years, states, genders, and climates as it confronts the concurrent apocalypses of being trans and poor in America. Like the designated hitter or designated driver, the trans poet is brought in to get everyone home. The poems in this collection are about living—not forever, but for the ride.

Praise

Where to begin? That this book is a knockout? Check. That the voice of Gion Davis is compelling and constantly pushing the edge of thinking into a new understanding of being? Check. Here is one of the many ambitions of this remarkable book: “I wanted / to write something / so full it felt empty, / an ornate bowl from the past / filled with nothing / but what happened.” And what happens here in Designated Stranger is the absolute now of struggling to remain sovereign in a broken nation. It’s a road book, a diary, a love letter, a treatise on an abject Americana. Let me finish where I began, this book is a knockout. – PETER GIZZI, author of Fierce Elegy and Now It’s Dark 

If Jack Kerouac had been a trans man in contemporary America “with no job and a credit card” raised on a sheep ranch in rural Española, New Mexico writing unstanzaed poems that ribbon vertically down the page like rattlesnakes, he might have created something like Gion Davis’s Designated Stranger, an of-the-moment but timeless Beat-style masterwork. The brilliance of these poems is inseparable from their bravado and bravery, their eye for the truth and their eye for the truth of glorious details:  the “agate alien eyes / of bighorn ewes,” “a Northern Harrier // flying low over the Dollar Tree,” “the veal kennels / Backlit on the hills with little steers silhouetted inside them.” I love Davis’s mordant humor in the face of pain, delivered in full poker face: Life is a “bad idea in cowboy boots.” “When I remember the old life, it’s the way bubblegum / remembers an extinct banana.” “Body, a pegboard / to hang anger on / beside the hammers / in the garage.” It is difficult to explain and even more difficult to render “queer effervescence” at it appears in rural places. For those of us raised where “even the real flowers looked plastic,” we designated strangers, well, we know it when we see it. – DIANE SEUSS, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry

Rising tender from the ashes of American romanticism, Gion Davis’s Designated Stranger exhibits a polyphony of forms, insights, and attitudes anybody with a soul still online in their brains might use to remember how to breathe. “Who will / Read my poems when everyone is dead?” Davis asks, foreboding of a life measured by wandering still-yet-to-be-had even after we’ve been broken and rebuilt so many times we hardly hold form. One thing’s for sure: Gion Davis refuses to give up on his best ghosts, whether we deserve their candor or not, and his continuing bravura for revitalizing longing from neck-deep in the undead is a line in the sand I’ll hold like a candle. – BLAKE BUTLER, author of Molly

I’m not sure I can accurately explain why or even pinpoint exactly when, but at a certain point in reading Designated Stranger, I realized I was crying. I think it’s the way the sadness tangles up in knots with how beautiful it all is—the world I mean, but also the poetry. I think it’s the fact that they’re so inextricably linked. That we have to have both—the vast emptiness that comes with being human, and the unrepentant joy that comes with counting the flower bushes and the blackbirds and the truck-stop diners. Gion carries it to us, all somehow contained in his hands alone, and lets us pull threads until we find the piece we need. – DAN CAMPBELL, lead singer and songwriter for The Wonder Years

Joy does not come cheap in Designated Stranger. America makes nothing easy. No one consents to being born in a place requiring credit scores, and Davis lyricizes a turbulent family of origin, economic precarity, and gender expansion with convincing buoyancy. Despair could easily flatten these intersections, but poem after poem–with quotables galore–Davis writes odes to life that include the world and all its particularities. – K. IVER, author of Short Film

About the Author