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.

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.