The Desire Line: Memory & Impermanence

Sven Davisson's first full length collection of poetry The Desire Line is a textual and photographic meditation on memory and impermanence.

We now live in an unprecedented world of images. The gilt icon of ages past, the altar triptych with its eternal dramatis personae, was a singular awe-inducing experience. Modernity as encapsulated in the endless reproducibility of images and words has given rise to a new magical landscape, personal and pagan in its fetishism. Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, "All photographs are memento mori". They capture an instance in time that will never occur again. Living or dead, the faces that look back at us from family snapshots are no more. Time has moved on, that fractional moment is past. Every photograph is an evidentiary exhibit of impermanence, itself impermanent as light slowly fades that which light and chemistry created.

Sven Davisson's poetry is a bracingly unique combination of Buddhism, eroticism, urbanity, mythology, and modernity. Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O'Hara all seem to speak again through him. --Jeff Mann, author of Ash: Poems from Norse Mythology

Davisson has had a deeply rooted passion for photography since the first roll of Tri-X he shot with his parent s Miranda G SLR. He received a B.A. in photography and cultural studies from Hampshire College where he studied with Jerome Leibling and Carrie Mae Weems. A pioneer of rebel DIY publishing, Davisson produced the zine mektoub in the 90s and is currently the founding editor of Ashé Journal publisher at Rebel Satori Press. He is the author of the collections The Starry Dynamo: The Machinery of the Night Remixed and The Star Set Matrix. His story "Dim Star Descried" was selected for the 2009 edition of Wilde Stories: The Best in Gay Speculative Fiction. In addition his work has appeared in the anthologies Suffering from the Night: Queering Bram Stoker's Dracula, Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism, and I Do/I Don't, as well as the journals Abrasax: The Journal of Magick and Decadence, Gnosis, and Ashé.