Shattered Sonnets Love Cards and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities

In her stunning second collection, poet Olena Kalytiak Davis confirms her reputation as a breathtaking verbal acrobat, a daredevil on the high wire of life and love. Her deeply personal poems echo everything from nursery rhymes to classics, revealing poetry buried in ordinary speech. Whether remonstrating with a former lover or evoking her young children, the poet who reveals herself here is appealingly vulnerable yet gutsy, by turns blunt and tender. With dexterity and wit she stretches language to the wildest boundaries of poetic possibility: hers is a voice intimate and assured, her observations of the world delivered in love notes addressed to us all.

"did I mention my first kiss was extracted

by someone who never should have been that

lucky?" - From "Keep Some Stuff for Yourself"

Olena Kalytiak Davis's first collection, And Her Soul out of Nothing, was selected by Rita Dove for the Brittingham Prize for poetry. She has been chosen for inclusion in three Best American Poetry anthologies, and has received a Rona Jaffee Foundation Writers' Award and a Pushcart Prize. She lives andwrites in Anchorage, Alaska.

In her second collection of poetry, following the widely celebrated And Her Soul out of Nothing, Olena Kalytiak Davis offers deeply personal and unpredictable poems that echo everything from nursery rhymes to the classics while always revealing the poetry buried in ordinary speech. Whether remonstrating with a former lover or evoking her young children, the poet we encounter here is appealingly vulnerable yet gutsy, and by turns sexually blunt and tender.

With great dexterity and wit Davis stretches language to the wildest boundaries of poetic possibility. Hers is a voice at once intimate and assured, her observations of the world delivered in love notes addressed to us all:

did I mention my first kiss was extracted

by someone who never should have been that

lucky? and how much later I threw

my virginity and, later still, my vanity

away?

probably

"There is such a deep spiritual quest, such a tremendous inner hunger, at the heart of Olena Kalytiak Davis's radically fractured and ironic idiom that I feel as if I have been reading Hopkins through the lens of a shattered postmodern mirror. This convulsive book—at times funny, at times sick at heart—refracts and defends a wondrous light."—Edward Hirsch, author of Lay Back the Darkness and On Love

"Olena Kalytiak Davis writes poems of visionary rapture and longing, and of erotic loss and fulfillment. Formally and musically, she is in love with tradition and out to wring its neck. She trusts her own idiosyncrasy and nerve to lead her to what Frost called 'a momentary stay against confusion.'"—Tom Sleigh, author of The Dreamhouse

"[These] sonnets and other importunities are completely energized, full of the evidence of the new thing they are. Davis has made herself herself, well beyond a mere style (though there is nothing mere about her style, of which there is plenty)—a scary thing (to make yourself yourself), a thing few poets seem to be inclined to do these days. For that alone I bow in her direction."—David Rivard, author of Bewitched Playground

In her stunning second collection, poet Olena Kalytiak Davis confirms her reputation as a breathtaking verbal acrobat, a daredevil on the high wire of life and love. Her deeply personal poems echo everything from nursery rhymes to classics, revealing poetry buried in ordinary speech. Whether remonstrating with a former lover or evoking her young children, the poet who reveals herself here is appealingly vulnerable yet gutsy, by turns blunt and tender. With dexterity and wit she stretches language to the wildest boundaries of poetic possibility: hers is a voice intimate and assured, her observations of the world delivered in love notes addressed to us all.

"did I mention my first kiss was extracted

by someone who never should have been that

lucky?" - From "Keep Some Stuff for Yourself"

Olena Kalytiak Davis's first collection, And Her Soul Out of Nothing, was selected by Rita Dove for the Brittingham Prize for poetry in 1997. She has been included in three Best American Poetry anthologies and has received a Rona Jaffee Foundation writers award and a Pushcart Prize. She lives and writes in Anchorage, Alaska.