shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities

Olena Kalytiak Davis

When it was originally released, Olena Kalytiak Davis’s second collection of poetry, shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities, solidified her reputation as a poet willing to go there, a seducer of the universal “i” in poems that are astonishingly, even uncomfortably, intimate, acerbic, and humorous. Davis surpasses expected poetic confession, bringing readers directly into the game: “Soon, Reader, soon you will leave me, for an italian mistress.” These poems admit their own failures but offer no escape from the poet’s gaze. Although Davis rebels against convention, her fluency in the poetic tradition—from Shakespeare to Dickinson to Plath to nursery rhymes—makes possible a poetic acuity that remains grounded in ordinary speech. Whether shattered or backhanded, whether playful, confrontational, or sly, these poems are love notes addressed to all of us.

ISBN: 9781556594403

Format: Paperback

About the Author

Olena Kalytiak Davis, a first-generation Ukrainian-American, was born and raised in Detroit and educated at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan Law School, and Vermont College. She is the author of four full-length collections. Her first book, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), received the Brittingham Prize. Kalytiak Davis’s honors also include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Guggenheim. Kalytiak Davis lives in Anchorage and Brooklyn.

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