“it breaks my heart”: an interview with Noah Davis

Helena Feder & Fabian Gomez Irizarry

TRP: Your poem, “Snow Geese Flying at Night” is one of the most striking poems in the Spring 2025 issue. It has a clarity of vision, of both the beauties and horrors found in nature. Your poem refuses to moralize or epiphanize as these images unfurl. Any thoughts on this? 

Noah Davis: Thank you for the kind words on the poem. They mean a lot, and the reading is spot on for the moment I wanted this poem to capture.

This scene of the poem happened as my wife and me were walking from our car to our apartment after dinner with some friends when we were living in Missoula, Montana. I looked up at the night sky because I heard honking; the light from the city caught the underside of what looked like 200 snow geese migrating south. The geese were so high that the line of them was as thin as a worm. It was strange to have that metaphor come so suddenly, but that’s how it happened. I saw this unequivocally beautiful scene—an undulating white line in an expanse of black—and immediately thought of a heart worm. This was during hunting season; I hunt because it is how my family gathers our red meat, and so I had been processing deer. We keep the hearts to eat fresh and sometimes there are heart worms in the muscle. These discoveries aren’t appetizing but, at the same time, the contrasting colors of white and red and black are beautiful.

Human cultures that have tried to dominate the greater-than-human world have long imposed their own standards of morality on other species, naming one animal or act as innocent and another as evil. The Christian Great Chain of Being formalized a hierarchy of God, humanity, and other creatures, and then Descartes came along with mind/body (and so also human/nonhuman) dualism. The wonders of the living world are putrefied. Spiritually and philosophically, the greater-than-human world becomes objects for humans to manipulate for economic gain or a canvas for our morality. There isn’t enough space here to dive into animal morality, which I believe is both real and unlike ours, but I will say this: the heart worm is not evil. The heart worm is a living being like all other living beings. And like all other living beings, the heart worm had no say in what it would be. We did not choose to be human.

TRP: You have two books: Of This River, winner of the Wheelbarrow Emerging Poetry Prize, and The Last Beast We Revel In, published earlier this year by CavanKerry Press. How are these books similar to or different from one another? 

Noah Davis: I wonder if they are more similar or more different. I guess that’s what some poets think about as soon as they have more than one book. Humans can’t help but compare! They are both collections that are grounded in the same place, a somewhat fictionalized version of my home valley in Northern Appalachia. They have a similar focus but use different avenues to reach that focus.

Of This River is nearly a novel in poems as the reader follows the arc of Short-Haired Girl. The river valley and Short-Haired Girl are enhanced by the perspectives of others—her grandmother, brother, cousin, aunt, mother, father, snapping turtle, trout—and through this lens the place, the struggles, and the joys of these people and animals are shared. A theme that arises through the poems is the interconnectedness of the world. Short-Haired Girl dies in the first poem drowning in the reservoir and is eaten by turtles. Short-Haired Girl eats turtles in another poem with her grandmother. All waters converge. All lives converge. Everything returns to earth. I came to love my home place even more through these poems.

The Last Beast We Revel In is again set in this river valley, but this time, instead of having multiple characters, the poet ‘I’ is much more pronounced. So is love. Love of place, love of family, and love of the “beloved” all combine to show that there is really only one love. Each love supports the other and teaches us to love and live more deliberately.

I’m a younger poet and I hope I have a long life of writing ahead of me. I don’t know what will change in the coming decades. However, I feel like my home, the people, and the greater-than-human world of that place will always be an obsession for me. I doubt a lifetime of writing will be enough.

TRP: How has your connection to Northern Appalachia informed your writing? What do you most want people to know about it?

Noah Davis: Northern Appalachia is my home, and I love it even though it breaks my heart.

I grew up in a time when there was still some strip mining in the mountains to the west, then that ended. I watched giant windmills go up on the ridges. A fracking machine repair plant was built across from my neighborhood. I could tell what time it was if I woke in the night by the direction the trains were heading. I know where there are dead streams from the acid mine drainage and what waters we shouldn’t eat fish from. The house I grew up in is within three quarters of a mile from three different factories.

And at the same time, the natural world endures, as does the connection people have to it. I know where to find blackcap raspberries and ginseng and the coldest water on the mountain. I know what fish are in what water. I know where there are flocks of turkeys and where deer go to hide. I’m not the only one who knows these things. I’m not the only one who loves this place.

I want my poems to show that there are still places in this century where this knowledge, love, and connection remain. Where this connection to place is valued. It’s not the majority of people—Appalachia is not immune to cell phones and marketing—but there are people who live deliberately because of their relationship with place.

TRP: Can you take me through what writing a poem looks like for you? Do you have a set practice?

Noah Davis: All my writing starts with an image. I am drawn to poetry because of the images, the clarifying and slanting ways an image can be offered. Next is sound play, which is the engine for so much of my work. Sound is where I find a lot of the momentum in my drafting. I write out poetry in a notebook, typically in the morning. I always write a poem out in a block of prose first then work through line breaks later, unless the poem turns out to be a prose poem then I got lucky! I write the best when I have been reading a lot of poetry, and if I’ve been memorizing poetry, I can feel the tongue of the poem I’ve memorized in the new work. I can only write in private. I speak out loud too much when I’m drafting and that’s not a good thing to do at a library or coffeeshop.

TRP: What are the writers that have shaped you as a poet? Do you have any particularly strong influences?

Noah Davis: I was lucky to grow up with a poet as a dad. My dad, Todd Davis—another Tar River Poetry contributor—read me poems and gave me poetry books to read. He also hosted writers to visit his classes, and I’d listen to them talk late into the night. It was hard for me not to become a poet. Dad’s poems certainly had an influence on me and still do. I think he’s a great poet, and so do others. But beyond familial poetry influences, Langston Hughes, W.B. Yeats, Ross Gay, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Adrian Matejka, Natasha Trethaway, Michael McGriff, the wilderness poets of ancient China translated by David Hinton, and Seamus Heaney immediately come to mind. These poets’ books are never far away, and I pull them off the shelf often.

TRP: What drew you to publishing in Tar River Poetry?

Noah Davis: I was introduced to Tar River Poetry when I was in undergrad, and I loved the poems that the journal published. Tar River has such a history with a lineup of poets that this star-studded. I mean, in the Spring 2025 issue alone there is Jane Hirshfield, Dorianne Laux, and Sydney Lea. It took me a decade to place a poem in Tar River. I’m so grateful that I am now a contributor and what an honor to be nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the journal.

TRP: And what are you reading right now?

Noah Davis: This year has been a festival of poets I admire publishing books. I’ve been reading Austin Arajuo’s At the Park on the Edge of the Country published by Mad Creek Books; janan alexandra’s come from published by BOA; Daniel Lassell’s Frame Inside the Frame published by Texas Review Press; and Michael McGriff’s Angel Sharpening Its Beak from Carnegie Mellon University Press.