And Her Soul Out of Nothing (The Brittingham Prize in Poetry)

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, pleasurable, and above all transcendental.

----
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 show more maudlin or histrionic. There's a yearning in these poems that I cannot shake. show less

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. 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.

This is a fantastic example of modern poetry. Davis holds nothing back as she looks at how her childhood and young adult life affected her self image and interactions with those she cares for. she has a dynamic grasp of the uses of language the it shows on the page

One of the best books of poetry I've read in a long, long time.