​Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems
(Michigan State University Press, 2024)
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​In an age when many find themselves disconnected from the natural world, Davis offers the possibilities of reconnection, of listening to the earth’s labored breathing, to the thoughts of other-than-human animals and the languages trees speak. In thirty new poems, and with ample selections from his previous seven books, Davis’s roots run deep in Rust-Belt Appalachia, attending to the harmed but healing landscape, the people whose lives are too often neglected, and the looming threat of climate collapse and extinction. Known for both narrative and lyrical impulses, Davis asks readers to acknowledge their kinship with all living beings, which demands some grieving for past sins but also suggests a way toward restoration.

Coffin Honey
(Michigan State University Press, 2022)
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​In Coffin Honey, his seventh book of poems, celebrated poet Todd Davis explores the many violences we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here race, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction—both personal and across ecosystems—are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young boy who has been sexually assaulted struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named “Ursus” navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world. Each poem seeks to illuminate beauty and suffering, the harrowing precipice we find ourselves walking nearer to in the 21st century. Davis, whose work Orion Magazine likens to Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, names the world with love and care, demonstrating what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of  “Latin names, common names, habitats and habits…. steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.”
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​— ​Finalist for the Julie Suk Award

Native Species
(Michigan State University Press, 2019)​
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In his sixth book of poetry, Todd Davis, who Harvard Review declares is “unflinchingly candid and enduringly compassionate,” confesses that “it’s hard to hide my love for the pleasures of the earth.” In poems both achingly real and stunningly new, he ushers the reader into a consideration of the green world and our uncertain place in it. As he writes in “Dead Letter to James Wright,” “You said / you’d wasted your life. / I’m still not sure / what species I am,” and, to that end, Native Species explores what happens to us—to all of us, bear, deer, mink, trout, moose, girl, boy, woman, man—when we die, and what happens to the soul as it faces extinction—if it “migrates into the lives of other creatures, becomes a fox or frog, an ant in a colony serving a queen, a red salamander entering a pond before it freezes.” He wonders, too, “How many new beginnings are we granted?” It’s a beautiful question, and it freights, simultaneously, possibility and pain. These are the poems of a poet maturing into a new level of thinking, full of tenderness and love for the home that carries us all.
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— Winner of The ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Silver Award
— Winner of The Bloomsburg University Book Prize
— ​Winner of The Midwest Book Award

Winterkill
(Michigan State University Press, 2016)

In Winterkill, Todd Davis, who, according to Gray’s Sporting Journal, “observes nature in the great tradition of Robert Frost, James Dickey, and Jim Harrison,” offers an unflinching portrait of the cycles of birth and death in the woods and streams of Pennsylvania, while never leaving behind the tragedies and joys of the human world. Fusing narrative and lyrical impulses, in his fifth book of poetry Davis seeks to address the living world through a lens of transformation.
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​— ​Winner of The ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Silver Award 
— Finalist for The Midwest Book Award

In the Kingdom of the Ditch
(Michigan State University Press, 2013)
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In poetry that is at once accessible and finely crafted, Todd Davis maps the mysterious arc between birth and death, celebrating the beauty and pain of our varied entrances and exits, while taking his readers into the deep forests and waterways of the Northeastern United States. With an acute sensibility for language unlike any other working poet, Davis captures the smallest nuances in the flowers, trees, and animals he encounters through a daily life spent in the field. Davis draws upon stories and myths from Christian, Transcendental, and Buddhist traditions to explore the intricacies of the spiritual and physical world we too often overlook. In celebrating the abundant life he finds in a ditch—replete with Queen Anne’s lace and milkweed, raspberries and blackberries, goldenrod and daisies—Davis suggests that life is consistently transformed, resurrected by what grows out of the fecundity of our dying bodies. In his fourth collection, the poet, praised by The Bloomsbury Review, Arts & Letters, and many others, provides not only a taxonomy of the flora and fauna of his native Pennsylvania but also a new way of speaking about the sacred walk we make with those we love toward the ultimate mystery of death.

— ​Winner of The ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Bronze Award

Household of Water, Moon, & Snow: The Thoreau Poems
(Seven Kitchens Press, 2010)

After years of reading the journals and works of Henry David Thoreau, Todd Davis has written a series of poems that attempts to capture the smaller, neglected moments of Thoreau’s life and writing. Using the first and third person perspective, these poems make connections between the human and natural worlds, offering possible bridges between the two and urging the reader to cherish the world as Thoreau did.

The Least of These
(Michigan State University Press, 2010)

In his third collection of poems Todd Davis advises us that "theonly corruption comes / in not loving this life enough." Over the course of this masterful and heartfelt book it becomes clear that Davis not only loves the life he's been given, but also believes that the ravishing desire of this world can offer hope, and even joy, however it might be negotiated. Drawing upon a range of stories and myths, as well as from his own deep understanding of the natural world, Davis explores the connection between the visible and invisible worlds, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called "the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God." A poetic descendant of Walt Whitman, Davis invites us to sing "the songs we collect in the hymnals of our flesh- / impromptu, a cappella, our mouths flung open / in a great wide O."

Some Heaven
(Michigan State University Press, 2007)

Todd Davis writes poems that are spare yet eloquent, poems with an appealing simplicity that belies their insight and consequence. They are rooted in the firmament of nature's frequently bruised bounty, yet grounded by our all-too-human experiences on this planet. With the eye of a naturalist and the wisdom of a sage, Davis reveals scenes of our lives that we might have otherwise missed. His poems are like the best kind of snapshot; they show us the details that deserve more attention. With disarming directness, he connects nature to family, landscape to community, and earth to faith.  He urges us to see—not to take a quick look, but to really see—frost on goldenrods, the qualities of dirt, the color of air. Underneath, of course, these are poems about universal themes: love, loss, life, death; but in Davis's skilled hands, they appear to us to be more akin to wild strawberries growing along the field’s edge or apples discovered in an abandoned orchard: something fresh, unexpected, and thankfully welcomed.

Ripe
(Bottom Dog Press, 2002)

In his debut collection of poems, Todd Davis explores the rivers and streams, the forests and woodlots of the Midwest. Here family and landscape are inseparable, as are spirit and flesh, life and death. Drawn to an exploration of the myriad connections between all forms of living creatures, Davis’s poems are populated with bear and porcupine, loon and heron, as well as the lessons he learned from his farming grandfather and his veterinarian father.

A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia
(University of Georgia Press, 2024)
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Northern Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to a broad range of ecological and human cultures. With A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, editors Todd Davis, Noah Davis, and Carolyn G. Mahan recognize and celebrate this diversity and the fact that humans are storytelling creatures who develop relationships with their landscapes at the intersection of art and science. This guide introduces the reader to seventy indigenous species found in Northern Appalachia, a region comprising parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. As a hybrid literary and natural history anthology, the book consists of descriptions and notes on habitat, range, and ecology provided by six scientists with expertise in the region’s flora and fauna. In addition, eleven artists and seventy poets have created original artwork and poetry that illuminate the lives of the greater-than human world.

Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball
(Michigan State University Press, 2012)

If baseball is the sport of nostalgic prose, basketball’s movement, myths, and culture are truly at home in verse. In this extraordinary collection of essays, poets meditate on what basketball means to them: how it has changed their perspective on the craft of poetry; how it informs their sense of language, the body, and human connectedness; how their love of the sport made a difference in the creation of their poems and in the lives they live beyond the margins of poetry. Walt Whitman saw the origins of poetry as communal, a kind of oral mythmaking. The same could be said of basketball, which is the beating heart of so many neighborhoods and communities in this country and around the world. On the court and on the page, this “poetry in motion” can be a force of change and inspiration, leaving devoted fans wonderstruck.

— Winner of The ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Silver Award

Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets
(State University of New York Press, 2010)

This diverse collection of poems and companion essays by forty nationally and internationally known poets allows readers to experience the creative process through the eyes and voice of each poet. No matter how often we are told that revision is an essential component of poetic composition, it can be difficult to resist the temptation to think of the poem as having sprung spontaneously, Athena-like, from the writer’s head. By exposing readers to the finished product as well as the poet’s own account of the poem’s creation, Making Poems offers a behind-the-scenes perspective on the poetic process that will fascinate both beginning and established writers. The book also affords poetry instructors an opportunity to demonstrate to their students the ways in which poems can originate from seemingly mundane and unlikely sources.