Pyrrhic Symphony

Adam O. Davis

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496248282
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

In Pyrrhic Symphony, the speaker asks, "Should a poem be the pill or the pharmacy?" And the book replies: Why not both? It ails and wails, blooms and wilts, but always breathes, just as anyone reading this does. Part siren songs, part torch songs, Pyrrhic Symphony sings wry lullabies for apocalypses public, personal, and politic, moving from cruise ships to Krakatoa, from a dentist's office to a marriage as it explores how love, family, community, and art can function in the face of an increasingly hostile climate. And in lamenting how "all I ever wanted from love / was that it never change," the feverish speaker goes toe-to-toe with the nurse who watches over him as they encounter and recount a world of late capitalist excess. By turns ecstatic and demonic, tender and terrifying, Pyrrhic Symphony stands as an act of musical witness and cautious hope in this age of corrupted wonder.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Natural Histrionics
• Anthropocene Cool
• Pyrrhic Symphony
• The Nurse on the Nature of Silence
• Self-Portrait as Beehive
• Abstract Birth
• The Nurse on National Prayer
• Future Tense
• Tornado Debt
• The Nurse on the Consumer Abstract
• Infidelity
• Nabisco Theology
• The Nurse on Domestic Language
• Mutiny by Fish
• The Nurse on the Theory of the Self
• The Last Dream of Water
• This is a Test
• The Nurse on the Reality of Air
• Notes from the Republic of No
• The Halloween Habit
• Self-Portrait as the Interstate Highway System
• Underworld
• Soft Manifesto
• The States
• Pyramid Dream
• To Whom It May Concern
• The Aspirin Age
• The Nurse on Westward Expansion
• Insect Chorus
• Some Ghost
• The Nurse on the First Dream of Fire
• Terminal Felicity
• Stations of the Crossed
• Self-Portrait as Parable
• The Goodnight Rules
• Omaha Divorce
• Notes
• Acknowledgments