99 pages, $16 Jennifer Levin l The New Mexican In poetry circles, Jon Davis is known for writing and publishing under a variety of pseudonyms. Among his alter-egos are a feminist, a counter-culture goth, and an old radical with an elevated sense of his own talent. All have been published in prominent literary journals. In the 1990s, the splintering of ideologies into different personas came across as edgy. It was a time when many poets of Davis’ milieu — mainly those working in academia — eschewed political consciousness in favor of inscrutable beauty and a hard focus on image. When Davis wrote with political or social consciousness in the work he produced under his own name, his tone tended to be so arch that it was hard to tell what he really cared about.

In our current socially aware and sensitive era, Davis’ old tricks can read as a poet unable to authentically address all the parts of himself. Worse, he often seemed to be making fun of the poetry his personas produced, as well as the literary establishment’s willingness to publish it. But now, in his seventh full-length collection, Above the Bejeweled City, Davis seems to be attempting to integrate his interior conflicts, traumas, long-standing complaints, fears, and mistakes. It’s a sorrowful book, sometimes self-pitying, but still full of his signature biting wit. It’s confessional, political, and caustic about the state of contemporary poetry. Davis hasn’t banished his alter-egos. He’s letting them all play in the same sandbox with him and seeing how everyone gets along.

The book is curated like an emotional roller coaster, with poems about the natural world providing buildup, poems about devastation and betrayal acting as the sharp inclines and upside-down loops, and poems about jazz providing some respite from the action. Clever indictments of pop culture are studded throughout. These are both humorous and unnerving, as in the prose poem “Fashion Report.”

“Was it a shirt in or a shirt out age? No one knew for certain,” it begins. “It was clearly not a rolled pants era, though a few, in isolated moments, mistook it for one. It was not a blue eyeshadow and pink lipstick era, that seemed clear.”

“Fashion Report” might at first appear to be nothing more than a joke. But as the poem goes on, Davis asks what it means that traditionally unflattering and counterculture items have become mainstream in a time of endless war and bleak economic prospects. He asks what this says about the psychology of our era while simultaneously reveling in the absurdity of the premise. “Was this incoherence a sign? And why now this incoherence, this unseemly recklessness among the wearers of clothing?” he asks at the end. “Where were our vestments taking us? What would be the human cost?”

The more serious poems reveal a writer with demons that he’s just beginning to face on the page. Davis conjures this mostly through metaphor, as in “The Gift,” another prose poem. The speaker conveys a family history of hog farming and the ever-present noises of “grunting” and “chuffing” that come with that. But something more seems to be haunting the family lineage, something that stains everything it touches. The speaker then focuses on a child at night, who is trapped in an experience that Davis can’t or won’t name.

“It begins there as it must, there where he was carved from oblivion, hollowed out and filled again in darkness and mud, in stomp and roll, in wild grunting and slaughter,” he writes. “This part he was innocent of. This part was done, not chosen. This part he would suffer and slog through.”

“The Gift” is immediately followed by “Liminal,” a series of triplets about a summertime love affair on a college campus. The trysting couple is witnessed by someone, but the speaker doesn’t regret the coupling. It’s a confession of lust and happiness, tinged with nostalgia and admissions of weakness, that feels inextricably linked to the indelible emotional marking of “The Gift.”

“The Poet” is one of several poems that touches on authenticity in contemporary poetry. In these poems, Davis laments what he sees as the schism between the idea of being a poet and the actual writing of poetry. Davis was the fourth poet laureate of Santa Fe, so it’s hard not to see him as the poet in question when he writes of a man who washes ashore in a village and is declared poet laureate when the townspeople see that he is dreaming of love. He becomes a semi-sentient version of a bronze sculpture that tourists pose with, while inside “part of him was still stroking through a storm-tossed sea, waves rising mountainous around him, a poem churning in his chest like the light from an unreachable lighthouse.”

Above the Bejeweled City crackles with the fire of Davis’ creation, but not every poem feels honed to his usual exacting standards. The jazz poems are tepid filler, and some of his more earnest attempts at writing about world events seem unfinished, as if he doesn’t know quite where to go without the benefit of wit and remove. Davis is most successful when writing about himself and his personal concerns. In the fragmented “Soundings,” he offers a glimpse into how his poems form.