“Davenport writes like Bukowski might have written if he’d been able to hold his liquor better.” –Eric Miles Williamson, American Book Review.

From The Back Cover

Uncontainable Noise is wildly alive: a collage that is part shoot-out at the poetry corral, part love story, a collection that overmodulates fearlessly into new domains of tone.  Steve Davenport has created a new world that is ribald, violent, reverent, and thoroughly word-drunk. The myth of the Western is inlaid with dream songs till “the good news is frontier.”  And there’s plenty of that edgy quality –frontier — in these pages.  Davenport’s playful, linguistically rich poems — sonnets, yodels, yawps, howls, cool parables, badass laments — are inventive, surprising. Anyone who loves language and imagination will revel in this exuberant, truly uncontainable, first book.   — Alice Fulton

The energetic poems of Uncontainable Noise ride and drink and sex across three different relationships, moving, in the course of the book, from pain to happiness with an obsessive, iterative drive suggestive of the pleasures and burdens of love.  The language here remembers itself, sends roots forward into other poems, words and lines recur and loop, as you would expect in any fundamental working-through.  While catharsis is too small a word for what is achieved, it suggests how deeply these poems reside in the poet.  And while this is largely a chronicle of failure, it is also a vindication of our attempts to touch, to speak, for as Davenport writes, “you can’t change the naked fact: that you’re waiting/for something you can’t name or find in hips alone.”   –Bob Hicok

From Reviews

“Steve Davenport’s Uncontainable Noise is a book I’d recommend for the National Book Critics Circle Award if I were still on the Board, and it’s also a book I’d have given to my gas-station-attendant father. It’s a book poets will either be jealous of or admire, and it’s a book any barfly worth his sourmash will enjoy and hopefully pass out reading.”

–Eric Miles Williamson, American Book Review (reprinted in Industrial Worker Book Review See a reprint of this review in The Industrial Worker Book Review

“What there is though of the cowboy in these poems is an attitude which transcends the simple and violent lexicon of Remingtons and bullets; it is an archetypal outlaw spirit, a resistance and resilience, that passionate, uncontainable style of being in the world that makes the cowboy so very dark, both darkly irresistible and darkly dangerous.”  –Kathleen Graber, The Literary Review  Read the review here.

“[T]his book is full of wild, gorgeous, rocking, yes, uncontainable noise!”  –Kathleen Kirk, Rhino Read a reprint of that review here.

“The poems he writes are crowd-pleasers, unapologetically brusque and manly not in the Johnny Depp way so much as the old-guy-picking-a-fight-at-the-end-of-the-bar way. He’s brave enough, in other words, to channel the personas we’re not supposed to enjoy anymore, to turn a stereotype inside out until we see the real hurt it’s hiding, and to see poetry not as an exercise in high art so much as Saturday double-feature, the little kids and the popcorn and the big kids necking in the back rows and Mom across the street cheating on Dad and Dad cussing at the cartoon sailor he’s about to punch in the mouth and regret punching a half-second later. It’s sad that the exigencies of American publishing or whatever and whatever else haven’t delivered him the crowd. Or not yet. It’s still early, right?”  –Kyle Minor, HTML GIANT Read the review here.

Purchase Uncontainable Noise from Pavement Saw Press or from SPD (Small Press Distribution).