And Her Soul Out Of Nothing

by Olena Kalytiak Davis

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
Paper: 978-0-299-15714-2 | eISBN: 978-0-299-15713-5 | Cloth: 978-0-299-15710-4
Library of Congress Classification PS3554.A93757A8 1997
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Both contemporary and other-worldly, Davis's lyrical poetry is a fearless expression of the spirit which defines the very essence of our beings.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Olena Kalytiak Davis lives in Juneau, Alaska. A first-generation Ukrainian-American, she grew up in Detroit and has since lived in San Francisco, Prague, Lviv, Paris, Chicago, and the isolated Yup'ik community of Bethel, Alaska. She studied at Wayne State University, University of Michigan Law School, and Vermont College. She was the winner of the 1996 Rona Jaffe Writer's award, and her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 1995, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly Review, Field, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. This is her first book.

REVIEWS

“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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

A Few Words For The Visitor In The Parlor

I'm Only Now Beginning To Answer Your Letter

Like Working At Wal-Mart

Another Underwater Conversation

But, It's Jazz

The Way He Sold It

The Weathered Houses On Ptarmigan Road

Father's Famous Devastation

Who Cares About Aperture

The Outline I Inhabit

Something More Fragile Than This

Moorer Denies Holyfield In Twelve

To Those Capable Of Deriving The Greatest Benefit

Resolutions In A Parked Car

Multilated Versions Of My Personality Write Poems, Treat Me With Irony And Condescension

The Scaffolding Inside You

The Panic Of Birds

Hey Precious, Listen

Thirty Years Rising

Palimpsest

The River Twists Like Lake Shore Drive

Angels And Moths

An Imaginative Study In Degradation

The Unhoused Heart

It's Shaped Like A Fork

Buhrstone

It Was A Coffin That Sang

Saxifrage and Cinquefoil

Klage

Your TV Lit You Like A Roman Candle

The Gauze Of Flowers, A Love Poem

Bitterns, Heronries

In Defense Of Marriage

Ovarian Tree

This Is The Way I Carry Mine

Silkweed

This Cold Way Of Life

A Seasonal Dwelling

Welcome To Lascaux

She Was Just A Sketch

I've Always Been One To Delight In The Misfortunes Of Others

Like Kerosene

The Silt Of Sleep

Logical Games For The Unbeliever

All The Natural Movements Of The Soul

Perhaps By Then You Will No Longer Be In Love

The Eccentric Practices Of Certain Medieval Saints

Should One Prefer Purity To Intensity of Soul?

Sleep Was An Inlet

Around the Edges Of A Cold Cold Day

As Empty As A Church, I Believe I Am A Small Testament To The Failing Relationship Between Space And Light

Postcard

Against Devotion

This Specific Tree

There May Be More Of This World Than Can Possibly Exist

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