Olena Kalytiak Davis

I don't quite have the poetic vocabulary to encapsulate what "And Her Soul Out of Nothing" is like as a book. The easiest thing to do would be to make a comparison between this poetry and watching morning light refract off glass, illuminating your familiar world in new ways. Davis is heaving a deep throated cry, using familiar notes, that I have never heard before in such a pitch that resonates deeply with my aesthetic and spiritual understanding. Reading this collection is refreshing, show more pleasurable, and above all transcendental.

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I appreciate the sentiment of my previous review even if I don't fully understand it. What caught me off guard in my rereading was Davis's judicious use of imagery that in other contexts might've struck me as maudlin or histrionic. There's a yearning in these poems that I cannot shake. show less

After reading "And Her Soul Out of Nothing" I needed more of Olena Davis. "Shattered Sonnets..." did not disappoint. The poems in this collection carry a similar intensity of content as her first collection but Davis plays a lot more with syntax, grammar, and form. This play with language doesn't communicate the text's inability to communicate, rather, it heightens the desparation of the speaker of the poem to be heard by their addressee (either god, the reader, love, or the speaker themselves).

Feels a bit like Plath (before she delved all the way down) with a tinge of Tsvetaeva and a whole lot of modern, urban feel to it. She describes herself as having "hipbones/instead of children" and writes poems about puking in parking lots, Wal-Mart workers, her mother's death. Some are better than others, of course. And one is excellent.

"The Scaffolding Inside You" is one of those poems that most writers never manage, and few manage more than one. Relentless, pitiless, perfectly pared down. show more It felt so true that as I read it, I inadvertently memorized it, because every phrase felt right. For that poem alone (and perhaps "Father's Famous Devastation") I recommend finding this book. show less

Davis dispenses her poetry with largesse. Her work is both wry and serious, flippant and urgent, personal and academic. Really, she gets away with a lot because she can, and her voice is grounded and towering all at once.