The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems

Olena Kalytiak Davis

In her first full-length collection in a decade, Olena Kalytiak Davis interrogates the possibilities of language and poetic thought in a heightened, hyperfeminist, postconfessional, lyrical cliff dive. Named by The New Yorker as one of the best books of the year, The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems boldly implicates readers in the act(s) of the book, casting us simultaneously as voyeur, antagonist, and beloved confidant. No subject matter is spared by Davis’s gaze—lost romance, literary criticism, sexual violence and provocation, parenthood, the female body—as meaning slips and accusations fly. The poet names names and confiscates pronominal identities, while sharing the mirror through which she stares us squarely in the eyes.

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ISBN: 9781556594601

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9781556594595

Format: Hardcover

Summer Fiction

My fancies fluttered round the same images
like martins round a bell tower at dawn.
I checked my e-mails, then, I checked them again:
lariat sweep and stallion glow.
Some one hour’s experience for which we
stubbornly subornatively return:
a dalliance at an execution.
Everything reduced to occasion

but the dailiness of my great Slavic beauty,
unwitnessed, being passed on and through. But

green after green after green!
Summer like summer like summer!
Fat, like Tolstoy’s—
inside the house and out, fat!
Gathering raspberries in a bikini (chto takoe?)
as if the will of everyman were free!

The great Sky over Austerlitz.
The old Oak near Otradnoe.
The Hut at Mytishchi.
The platform at Astapovo Station.

In the Backyard in a Billabong Bikini.

Each day you did not see me was something
you lost, like, at cards.

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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Reviews

“The Poem She Didn’t Write is a breakup book, full of the kinds of invective and taunts honed by a person who has spent, as all of us have now spent, infinite hours online. Its complex tones arise from the poet’s wanting equally to seduce and to repel a lover whose deepening silence only provokes rhetorical escalation.” —Dan Chiasson, New Yorker

“Davis’s first full collection in a decade should be stamped with the warning, ‘Buckle up!,’ because entering this writer’s mind is one wild ride of digression, mutation, and syntactical and typographical experimentation.” —Booklist

“While poetry is the language of love, it is also the language of love lost, innocence lost, youth lost, and aspirations unfulfilled. It is a language that Olena Kalytiak Davis has truly mastered in all its simplicity.” —Midwest Book Review