BLAZE (2015)

Willow Books Emerging Poets & Writers Series

978-0-9961390-6-9

92 pages

$18.95

TO ORDER

BLAZE revolves around the experiences of a young man coming of age in Detroit. He is a child of the hip-hop generation–urban and world-wise. Like so many of his peers, he has experienced childhood traumas—while an infant, his mother died at his father’s hands, then his father committed suicide two years later.

It’s hot in Kahn Santori Davison’s Blaze, and I’m not just talking about the high school honey with with “Kool-Aid colored eyes…skin-tight Calvin Klein jeans” and “a belt buckle that said H O T T I E.” This collection, like the tale of the Phoenix, is about a young man rising from personal destructions renewed and more enlightened. With the love of his aunts and grandparents, Kahn’s speaker not only accomplishes this, but does so gracefully.

—Alan King, author of DRIFT

Blaze ignites in its reclamation towards self-identity above and beyond tragedy, and instigates for the renewal of one of Detroit’s own. Kahn Santori Davison’s language muses, “This/alchemy began with Conga/drums, not 808s.” He traverses beyond his historical migration of familial ties and connects with a cultural mysticism—finding a bittersweet station in life. From KRS-One to Eminem—from Jimi Hendrix to Jack White—Davison pluckily examines/defines what place and family mean—all the while blazing on.

–Curtis L. Crisler, author of WONDERKIND & Dreamist

Kahn Santori Davison is from Detroit, Michigan. He is a 2015 Kresge Fellowship winner. Formerly an arts columnist for The Gazette News and Arts and Entertainment writer for the Michigan Citizen, he is currently a music writer for the MetroTimes and an editor for AUX Media. A graduate of Oakland University, he has served as a creative writing instructor at Detroit Impact Community Center and Inside Out Literary Project. He was one-half of the poetry group Khaos and co-starred in the award winning play Mahogany Dreams. Kahn has been featured on countless radio and TV shows. A Cave Canem fellow whose works have been featured in The Alabama Poetry Society, The Entoitist, The Baltimore Review, London’s X-Bout, Barbaric Yap, Callaloo, Black Reniaissance Noire and The Litchfield Review, Kahn has read and lectured across the U.S., in Canada and in Europe. In addition to being the owner of Kahn Santori Photography and Primal Immortality Art and Shirts, Kahn is a proud husband and father of four.