In a world with two Trump administrations, one could be forgiven for rejecting out of hand the American myths that allowed such an abomination to happen. The “self-made man” always provided cover for the wealthy and the powerful. “Self-reliance” and “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” always provided justification for exploiting the poor and marginalized, while the “American dream” was dangled in front of them as motivation to work themselves to death for their boss’ profits. All of it supported on the world stage by “American exceptionalism” that allowed us to do whatever we wanted to the rest of the world and demand they thank us for it. (After “manifest destiny” and “go west, young man” gave us that same permission on our continent.) Even “the freedom of the open road,” that ecstatic life lived to its fullest, articulated most explicitly by the Beats and pursued by generations since, was used more to transfer responsibility from the men driving the cars to women they could leave behind. Assessing that from 2026, why save any of it?
But what if at least some of those ideas had facets worth saving? What if we could reclaim the positive from the negative? What if we could repair these myths so they help point toward a brighter future? In the poetry collection, “Designated Stranger,” Gion Davis repairs that myth of the open road of the Beats by helping it grow from partying white men in infinite adolescences to a more mature celebration of the joys of fearless living without assuming someone else will clean up your mess when you leave.
Davis takes us on road trips along soul-crushing routes that lead to breathtaking spaces, into redwood forests and to parties where the balance between ecstasy and regret wavers. The first line in the collection is “You can actually run away. You’re allowed to go, at least for a little while.” Later in the poem, Davis writes
It’s only
been since you’ve started doing the impossible that this secret trapdoor in
reality has opened.
In the collection’s penultimate poem, “Super Bloom,” we zip up and down the West Coast from the Cascades to Portland and Eugene, from San Luis Obispo to San Diego to San Bernardino, to Yermo and the Mojave.
It’s not that Davis doesn’t see the appeal of falling through that “trapdoor” forever. As he writes in “Nothing’s Hanging Out Going to Whole Foods,” “I make a shitty person, but I would have been an amazing tree.” But for most of us, including Davis himself, it’s not that easy.
I’m sick of coping.
I don’t want to be
brave, I want to be happy
goddamnit. I want to live
a full life, you motherfuckers.
Sure, if the world doesn’t interrogate your identity, doesn’t question every decision, doesn’t make demands on your time, doesn’t throw up roadblocks every time you travel, you can fall through that trapdoor forever and even make some beautiful art while you fall. But most people don’t have that privilege. So what do you do when the fetters of our society persist no matter how you strain against them?
“Designated Stranger” is not directly articulating some kind of new philosophy that blends freedom and responsibility into a morality that celebrates individuality and community, nor do I think it would be as strong a collection of poetry if it did. Rather, through a number of poems that balance the beauty of letting go with the strife of letting go, and the challenge of doing the hard work of being yourself in community and the beauty of being yourself in community, and through poems that balance simple direct statements with more exuberant images, Davis creates a repaired version of Kerouackian freedom that, like kintsugi, makes sure we remember how much harm it can still cause.
That specific reparative writing is only one of the collection’s projects. Davis also imagines other potential spaces of poetic existence as in “How to Be a Wildfire (If Conditions are Better to be a Man)” in which he writes
Listen
to that Joni Mitchell record
with the big scratch
on the B-side. Live inside
the scratch
and grapples with his identity as a trans man in “The Most Punk Thing You Can’t Remember,” as in
I dream again
Of the woman I was. I see her across the room more clearly
Than I have ever seen myself awake and she looks really good
And there was never anything wrong with her but she couldn’t stay
as well as plays in that unique linguistic space the freedom and formatting of poetry creates, as in this play on the meanings of “blaze” from “Can I Call You From a Waffle House?”:
the past
doesn’t change and the future
is erasing itself the way a fire is erasing
the blazes you watched your father hack
into the trunks of aspens
Sometimes drilling into an image and experience with the potent focus of poetry as in “Can I Call You From Waffle House?” and other times exploring a whole arc of complexities and contradictions, as in the particularly evocative “Simple Divorces,” Davis has created a vibrant poetic tableau. Fear and bravery. Fight and flight. Party and hangover. Future and past. Ultimately, “Designated Stranger” creates a poetic vision of life in this America, that, to quote a certain well known proto-Beat, “contains multitudes.”
Josh Cook is a bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, where he has worked since 2004. He is also author of the critically acclaimed postmodern detective novel “An Exaggerated Murder” and “The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the 21st Century.” He has self-published the zine For White Dudes (Like Me) Who Have Not Considered Reading Trans Books. His fiction, criticism and poetry have appeared in numerous leading literary publications. He grew up in Lewiston, Maine, and lives in Somerville. If you’d like to read more about books, subscribe to his newsletter Yesterday Today Tomorrow Forever.
A version of this story appeared originally on the Porter Square Review of Books. Buy “Designated Stranger” from Porter Square Books.
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