There is music in this poetry collection. Music of form. Music of voice. Music of the soul. There are even poems about music. In one love song to music itself we see how music shaped this poet’s life, providing meaning, healing, solace, friendship. There is even music in the silences. This poetry collection is called a “mixtape,” and like a curated cassette tape of old it spills with songs familiar and unexpected. Playfulness, too. You see that playing especially with all the different poetic forms throughout: ghazals, concrete poems, villanelles, ballads, elegy, and even poetic forms of Davies’ own making. We get a Side A that begins with the body, both that of the poet and the earth, the larger body that sustains us. Flip to Side B and the poems take a wide view, paying witness to the cracks and fissures in today’s world. But these poems also offer invitation, a summoning for all of us who care to come together—in kindness—and “mend a broken world” with joy and even dance.
—Michael Kiesow Moore, author of What To Pray For, Whimsies, and The Song Castle
<em>Mixtape to Mend a Broken World</em> is a powerful meditation on grief, resilience, and renewal. This haunting and restorative collection turns wounds into mythology, tracing what remains after rupture and what becomes possible through repair. Here, Minneapolis becomes both body and archive, a city holding memory in its streets, scars, and sound. Davies listens closely to what lingers after loss: the residue history leaves behind, the static that refuses to clear, and the unfinished refrains our bodies and communities carry long after the music has ended. With a poet’s ear for rhythm and a storyteller’s devotion to repair, these poems examine loss, identity, love, and trauma, revealing music as a language of healing and thriving itself as an act of resistance. This book does not pretend the world isn’t broken. It asks what we do with the pieces, and who we become after rebuilding from the wound.
—Dralandra Larkins, author of Before I Lie
There is much to note, much to heed in Joshua Davies’s poems. They are, to borrow his words, ‘a conduit for communion,’ ‘a constant, expansive music’ bringing the reader ‘new worlds and lost mantras.’ A proven navigator of the visionary imagination, he can also be tremendously funny, as in his spot-on satire of the state of literature in our time, ‘The Economics of Poetry.’ One finds in these poems an inventive fascination with form and a confluence of voices, all somehow Davies’s own, the ghazal ‘America,’ for example, fusing Rumi and Allen Ginsberg. These poems in their vast variety all have in common a pure rock and roll heart, and even the most grieving never pass up an opportunity to dance.
—Thomas R. Smith, author of over 20 books, including Medicine Year and Heaven and Nature
Joshua Davies’ <em>Mixtape to Mend a Broken World</em> is a keen observer’s comment on the state of our world today. He shapes you with images and knowledge from your youth – fireflies, skipping stones, swallowing the stars and moon of the night sky, love, music, and dancing, yes there is dancing. He draws you in, implores you to not only pay attention to your own body but also that of Mother Earth and beyond – to take in every object and subject living and nonliving that speaks to your senses, and then urges you to take in more. In this work, breath and water are one, as it should be. Then he turns. Introduces us to people – like us – Mosquito Joe, Alexandra, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and so many more. And we are besieged with weight, fear, silence, chaos, incredulity, and the cruelty the world has embraced. But Joshua’s poems fill us with a burning urge to resist, revoke, reject, and reclaim. This is one mixtape you will “visually listen to” time and time and time again.
—Ardie Buckholtz Medina, Anishinaabe Poet and Playwright
This volume is a masterwork of poetics and form and a testament to the power of precision and emotional consistency. Joshua’s is a dazzling voice that pays homage to all we observe and puts focus on the ordinary and the overlooked that surrounds us every day and makes it seem luminous and extraordinary. There are varieties of curiosity, of lust, passion and ultimately praise for love and what is beloved. The mixtape these poems presents resurrect selves we were and selves we may still be becoming. It’s a reminder that music is the ballad of our identities, and that by deep listening we are discovered and affirmed. Side A arrives as a spell of longing and the matters of the heart and its undeniable vulnerability; side B as a testament to the grace of acute compassion that waves a banner of justice and equality for humanity and all beings. Davies reminds us in his tremendously visionary book that poetry will always be the singular voice that shines through the shifting kaleidoscope of our hearts that will not yield—that must be heard, considered, and that will prevail.
—Ben Westlie, author of Run From Your Now, Minnesota Book Award Finalist 2025
