Taking Care of Time

For poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis, the truth revealed through poetry is similar to what she has experienced in the heightened and urgent dramas that occur in health care—those suspended moments in which a dying heart might be revived or unbearable suffering relieved. We are vulnerable, her poems say, and we are dependent on one another—on the ways in which we care or fail to care for one another, in how we love or fail to love. In poems that are sensual, emotionally searing, and yet unfailingly tender, Davis shines a caregiver’s light on the most intimate details of the human body and the spirit within—how the flesh might betray, how it endures, and how ultimately it triumphs. 

CORTNEY DAVIS is a nurse practitioner and the author of Details of Flesh and Leopold’s Maneuvers, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her honors include an NEA Poetry Fellowship; three Connecticut Commission on the Arts poetry grants; an Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal; a Living Now Body Award; the Connecticut Center for the Book Award in Non-Fiction; an Independent Book Publishers Association’s Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal in Body, Mind & Spirit; and four Book of the Year awards from the American Journal of Nursing.