New Poetry Collection by Bethel Poet Laureate

When I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New & Selected was accepted for publication, Davis never guessed it would be published during a pandemic. Perhaps this is fitting, since many of her poems deal with her work in nursing and with how we care, or fail to care, for one another.

I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New & Selected contains new poems as well as poems selected from the Poet Laureate's previous poetry collections: Details of Flesh; Leopold's Maneuvers, winner of the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize; and Taking Care of Time, winner of the MSU press Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. These new and selected poems are presented in a unique format. Rather than one section of poems from each book and a section for new poems, in this collection the poems are mixed, presented in sections representing "voices": voices of healing, of home, of desire, of suffering, of faith, of letting go and holding on. These are the voices Cortney Davis hears as a woman, a nurse, a wife and mother.

In her acknowledgements, she pays tribute to our essential workers: "My gratitude and respect to those essential workers and healthcare providers--especially the nurses--who, during the time of the Coronavirus pandemic, raging throughout the world as this book goes to press, daily risk their lives in order to protect and save ours."