Climbing a Burning Rope

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.

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John Paul Davis gives voice to his spiritual dilemmas, his alarm about the state of our planet, and to the predicaments of his own quotidian workday routines, all major themes of this darkly comic, wise and wonderful collection of poems.

London Grip

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. With wry humor and attentive wit, these poems range from ‘Ode to Not Answering My Phone’ to ‘Speaking in Tongues’ to ‘Bring Your Selves from a Parallel Universe to Work Day’ to ‘Big Data,’ in which a man cracks his skull and lines of code and timesheets pour out. Climbing a Burning Rope is a timely collection that makes a heartwarming case for love, for community, and for more poems about key performance indicators.

Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca

As he hunts for the gems of tender humor and humanity buried in the drudgery of our American work lives, John Paul Davis warns us, ‘In the coming utopia, there will be even more paperwork.’ Is singing the remedy to corporate work? Is marriage secretly the most thrilling ride at the fair? These are some questions I wrote down while reading. Through poems that made my face hurt from grinning, Davis reminds us—with music and sweetness and aching—that the real work of our lives, in unequivocal terms, is always love.

Caits Meissner, editor of The Sentences That Create Us

John Paul Davis carries strange things in his pockets, some smuggled out of the wreckage of a religious childhood, others he will let loose among the screens and Post-it notes of the workplace: rabbits and horses and ancient deities and laid-off colleagues. There are poems here that testify to the irruptions of the holy into the mundane, poems that testify to the gap between belief and truth, poems that made me laugh, poems about how love and beauty remain undeniable in spite of the warming seas and the system’s lies.

Dougald Hine, cofounder of the Dark Mountain Project and author of At Work in the Ruins

Childhood sorrows, fruitless faith, and family’s failings create in the poet a need to balance the off-balance world with poems of forgiveness and love. Little things take on meaning: shelving books in the library, bagging groceries, even clapping, ‘especially if we are the only ones applauding.’ In Climbing a Burning Rope, redeeming acts of intimacy are more than consoling, they are seen and celebrated as holy gestures. As John Paul Davis writes of the human embrace, ‘When I lay my cheek on your clavicle / you put the little rabbit of your hand / inside my shirt over my sacrum / in our theology this choreography / is the same exact thing as praying.’

Richard Jones, author of Stranger on Earth

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