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.
**
Review
"This amazing book by a nurse-practitioner and poet joins the world of illness in the human body with the celebratory magnetism of erotic encounters. These states always begin with the physical, human form; Davis has an uncanny ability to create complex panoramas from acts of healing and redemption. This is a skillful and unforgettable collection.”— Bloomsbury Review
( Bloomsbury Review )
“The poems in Cortney Davis’s astonishing new book Leopold’s ManeuversM 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
(Rafael Campo)
“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
(Peggy Shumaker)
“[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
(Jeffrey Skinner)
“Davis is a poet and nurse practitioner whose poems unite flesh and spirit. Never flinching, she inquires into the creative, intimate venture of healing and being healed.”—Melanie Drane, Fore Word
(Melanie Drane Fore Word )
From the Inside Flap
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
"The poems in Cortney Davis’s astonishing new book Leopold’s ManeuversM 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.
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.
Cortney Davis is the author of a poetry collection, Details of Flesh, coeditor 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.

motw/Leopold's Maneuvers - Cortney Davis.epub

Courtney Davis

UNP - Nebraska

Bison Books

Prairie schooner book prize in poetry, Lincoln, 2004

United States, United States of America

Memory of the World Librarian: Slowrotation

Leopold's maneuvers
Treatment
Partial detachment
Lot's wife
Shipwreck
The brightest star is home
Prognosis
Masturbation
The jar beside the bed
Then it was simple
Rented rooms, Martha's Vineyard
Reading Sharon Olds
Night in Burlington
Parturition
March 28, 2001 / March 28, 1945
Mother's gloves
Shoplifters
Anorexia
In a deep pool bound by cement
Ear examined
Teasing was only the beginning
The ruined boy
Nights after mother died
When my father's breathing changed
It is august 24th
Examining the abused woman
Nunca tu alma
Every day, the pregnant teenagers
Phallus examined
Hurricane floyd
The condition of the world, august 1997
Charity
Water story
Confessions
Story teller
To make nothing out of something
The swan by the mall
Like mother, thirty years before her death
Everything in life is divided
God and the blueberries
How I'm able to love.

2025-10-27