Bottoming for Dummies - by James Davis (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2026 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Jill McDonough, Bottoming for Dummies is a funny, formally dazzling, and sexually candid exploration of what it means to surrender without disappearing.

Taking inspiration from A Midsummer Night's Dream, James Davis transforms Shakespeare's Bottom--a weaver famously turned into an ass--into a guide through queer desire, shame, family, faith, and pleasure. Here, bottoming is both an erotic position and a way of meeting the world: a controlled relinquishing of control that can become an act of trust, truth-telling, and strength.

Sonnets, sestinas, triolets, anagrams, and poems inspired by Scrabble's two-letter words encounter dildos, drag brunch, video games, pet tarantulas, Sonic the Hedgehog, and a lovelorn Eeyore. Beneath the collection's audacious humor and wordplay are deeply vulnerable poems about the complicated bonds that shape a life.

Unabashedly gay, tender, and inventive, Bottoming for Dummies argues that pleasure can be political, language can remake what once wounded us, and sometimes yielding is how we discover our power.

Review Quotes

"Bottoming for Dummies is a lexical and erotic romp! Shakespeare's Bottom presides as a guiding spirit over this bawdy and vulnerable collection. Exploring personal and sexual self-discovery, a queer coming of age, these poems draw from video and board games, theater, the animal kingdom, and family history. James Davis is attuned to the ever-shifting dynamics between children and their parents--distant and intimate, tense yet, sometimes, a source of balm. A connoisseur of sonic texture, Davis relishes in words as events of music and meaning. I admire the language of these poems, which delight through their frankness and good humor."

--Derrick Austin

"There seems to be no subject or life experience that Davis isn't willing to perceive through the wise and uncanny poet's gaze. Come for the title, but stay for the wordplay, the formal daring, the wit, the tenderness, and the time travel back to and through eras as recognizable as they are worth reliving. 'The world is never the same once a good bottom has been added to it, ' the poet intones, and not only is this sound logic, but one of many pithy and profound disclosures this very fine collection gives us access to. Pun intended."

--Tarfia Faizullah

"James Davis's charming and seductive book chats and sings of the comedy that intimacy implicates us: in Shakespeare and in Scrabble, in the high school plays and backseats of youth. There's pleasure everywhere to be found, even though it costs something. 'When we rip open the hearts / on our tiny packages of snacks, ' the poet writes in the midst of a fantastical airplane romance, 'we are briefly and handsomely fed.' The poems of Bottoming for Dummies are utterly playful, smart, moving, fabulous."

--Richie Hofmann

"If Shakespeare's Bottom had played Scrabble as well as he gave the fairies a prodigious head to prank upon, these witty poems might have been his manifesto. James Davis, pinching The Bard's ass and bottoms everywhere, is tender as he teases, vulnerable even as he roisters. Discipline spurs on these frisky spirits. Davis's linguistic verve turns invasive HIV-prophylaxis testing into triplet-rhymed tercets, and cannily allows him to confess of an old relationship that 'I put the Ho in / Houston, where I wanted / to put / the us.' There's heart aplenty here, too; flexing his muscular anagrams, Davis reveals how 'despair' is a mirror of 'aspired, ' and that to 'listen' isn't far from being 'silent.' Staging contemporary Queer desire--its exultations alongside its bafflements, its intimacies and its politicization under the current regime--Bottoming for Dummies is sassy, puckish, and ready to put readers under its spell.

--V. Penelope Pelizzon

About the Author

James Davis is the author of the poetry collection Club Q. His work has been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio and received the Anthony Hecht and Donald Justice Poetry Prizes, as well as support from the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, The Mastheads, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and other literary arts organizations. His poetry and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Electric Literature, Best New Poets, DIAGRAM, Copper Nickel, Five Points, and many other notable venues. Originally from Colorado Springs, he lives in Orlando, where he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida.