shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities

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.