“And Her Soul Out of Nothing is, quite simply, unlike any other collection I can remember reading in recent literature. There is an eerie precision to her work—like the delicate discernment of a brain surgeon’s scalpel—that renders each moment in both its absolute clarity and ultimate transitory fragility. Her language is quirky in the very best sense of that word; her use of syntax is brilliant.”—Rita Dove, Judge, Citation for the 1997 Brittingham Prize in Poetry

“A treasury of broken meditations and chipped singing, moments of insight and yearning appearing like bits of statuary plowed up in a field, perhaps more beautiful for their sudden unlikely emergence. Olena Kalytiak Davis’s poems find evidence of the spirit everywhere, in laundromats, in parking lots and frozen landscapes, in the panic of birds.”—Dean Young