City that ripens on the tree of the world

Is a cycle of twenty-seven poems emerging out of her time in Kraków, Poland, and conceived as a response to poet Ewa Lipska's figure, Mrs. Schubert, a kind of European "every woman" of modernity. The cycle addresses Lipska's poems, Droga pani Schubert (Dear Mrs. Schubert), as a polestar for Davidson's own verse. Through the creation of an equivalent persona (Mrs. Schmetterling), she explores poetry as the uncertain intersection of personal and historical forces--what Lipska might call the accident or "the spectacle of our lives," which one both participates in and observes as witness.