Affidavit by Starr Davis

Affidavit captures the passionate intensity of motherhood and custody battles within the constraining shape of bureaucratic legal forms. Presenting us with the horrors of incarceration and the wonders of birth, these poems testify to the power of parental love even amidst the suffocating apparatuses of the courtroom. Formally and emotionally complex, Affidavit pays attention to what happens when private lives are forced into public arenas of judgement.

Starr Davis is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and The Rumpus. She was the 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow with Haymarket Books and the Mellon Foundation. Affidavit is the most recent winner of Hanging Loose Press’s annual Founders Award for a first book of poetry.

 “A writer whose work inspires both hope and rage, leaving me eager to read more of this singular voice.”— May-lee Chai

“These poems are relentless: they will not let us pretend that Davis’s body exists apart from its familial or social history; they will not let us go until we accept as evidence the painful truths that the courts can’t hear, but that are always in poetry’s purview.”— Evie Shockley