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    Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities
    Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities
    Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities
    Ebook115 pages42 minutes

    Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities

    By Olena Kalytiak Davis

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    "[Shattered Sonnets] breathes life into American verse . . . [an] urgent and unrepentant collection."—Rick Moody, Poetry

    "This convulsive book [Shattered Sonnets]—at times funny, at times sick at heart—refracts and defends a wondrous light."—Edward Hirsch

    Olena Kalytiak Davis's Shattered Sonnets has earned "cult classic" status and is an unremittingly electrifying collection brimming with intelligence, humor, and ardor. Drawing on an impressive array of forebears including Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Plath, Davis overhauls the sonnet and revitalizes the confessional style in poems that leave no convention unquestioned, no expectation unthwarted, no letter, spelling, or line break unconsidered.

    From "sweet reader, flannelled and tulled":

    You are cold. You are sick. You are silly.
    Forgive me, kind Reader, forgive me, I had not intended to step this quickly this far
    back. Reader, we had a quiet wedding: he&I, theparson

    &theclerk. Would I could, stead-fast, gracilefacile Reader! Last,
    good Reader, tarry with me, jessa-mine Reader. Dar-
    (jee)ling, bide! Bide, Reader, tired, and stay, stay, stray Reader,

    true. R.: I had been secretly hoping this would turn into a love
    poem. Disconsolate. Illiterate. Reader,
    I have cleared this space for you, for you, for you.

    Olena Kalyiak Davis is the author of three books of poetry and currently works as a lawyer in Anchorage, Alaska.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2015
    ISBN9781619321250
    Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities
    Author

    Olena Kalytiak Davis

    A first-generation Ukrainian American, Olena Kalytiak Davis grew up in Detroit and was educated at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan Law School, and Vermont College. Davis’s poetry collections include And Her Soul Out of Nothing (1997), selected by Rita Dove for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities (2003), On the Kitchen Table from Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed (2009), and The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems (2014). Her approach to motherhood, intimacy, and small moments in life through sonnets and free verse captivates audiences and draws emotions with simple yet personal usage of words and language. Critic Dan Chiasson referred to Davis as “the rare poet who has made underproduction an aspect of her glamour.”

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    2.5/5

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    • 2/5
      I was assigned this book in graduate school. Now, I'm not a big fan of "mainstream" literary poetry, as you can probably tell from my large Bukowski and Ferlinghetti collections. And this book is pretty much everything I hate in popular contemporary poetry! In the book jacket, she is described as a "verbal acrobat, a daredevil on the high wire of life and love." Gag! Further, her poems "echo everything from nursery rhymes to the classics."I can't relate. Nor do I wish to. I don't want to know the author and I don't want to read her work. I want REALITY!
    • 1/5
      Her first book is quite good and then this one--after the first two poems--is basically unreadable. The good news? Contemporary poetry is vital enough to support a crappy book from a very promising and ambitious writer.

    Book preview

    Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities - Olena Kalytiak Davis

    table of dis- mal- contents

    dedication

    sweet reader, flanneled and tulled

    the sonnets

    small quilled poem with no taste for spring

    may be you are like me: scared and awake

    in the clear long after

    march licked me with all his brown lack

    shattered sonnet #3

    dear abiah

    a small number

    the lais of lost long days

    june twenty seven eight nine nineteen sixty seventy ninety six seven eight

    wow

    six apologies, lord

    the unbosoming

    of yawl and ketch

    in one of my

    dis-spelt

    quain

    to dante and cavalcanti and you

    she (as sonnet)

    letters to various personages

    the true repertory of the wrack and redemption of sir olena kalytiak davis

    dear beardtongue

    letter home

    poem convincing you to leave your wife

    keep some stuff for yourself

    to love

    other importunities

    a new philosophy of composition or how to ignore the non-reasoning creature capable of speeech perched outside your bathroom window

    you art a scholar horatio, speak to it

    moorings far faster

    despite ominous forebodings of sin sickness and death

    il penseroso and l'allegro: inverted and dubbed

    poem for my #*th birthday

    notes toward the ablation of the soul

    sign offs

    a dry death

    sign off #1

    sign off #2

    another sign off

    aloft in a tangerine cloud

    the o antiphons

    o great slacker

    this is the kind of poem i'm done writing, or, a small pang in spring

    the garden of love

    stripped from the waist up, love

    if you are asked

    forgoodisthelifeendingfaithandfitfully

    About the Author

    Books by Olena Kalytiak Davis

    Acknowledgments

    Copyright

    Specialthanks

    dedication

    sweet reader, flanneled and hilled

    Reader unmov'd and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc'd

    and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still

    I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.

    I crawl, Reader, servile and cervine, through this blank

    season, counting—I sleep and I sleep. I sleep,

    Reader, toward you, loud as a cloud and deaf, Reader, deaf

    as a leaf. Reader: Why don't you turn

    pale? and, Why don't you tremble? Jaded, staid

    Reader, You—who can read this and not even

    flinch. Bare-faced, flint-hearted, recoilless

    Reader, dare you—Rare Reader, listen

    and be convinced: Soon, Reader,

    soon you will leave me, for an italian mistress:

    for her dark hair, and her moon-lit

    teeth. For her leopardi and her cavalcanti,

    for her lips and clavicles; for what you want

    to eat, eat, eat. Art-lover, rector, docent!

    Do I smile? I, too, once had a brash artless

    feeder: his eye set firm on my slackening

    sky. He was true! He was thief! In the celestial sense

    he provided some, some, some

    (much-needed) relief. Reader much-slept with, and Reader I will die

    without touching, You, Reader, You: mr. small-

    weed, mr. broad-cloth, mr. long-dark-day. And the italian mis-

    fortune you will heave me for, for

    her dark hair and her moonlit-teeth. You will love her well in-

    to three-or-four cities, and then, you will slowly

    sink. Reader, I will never forgive you, but not, poor

    cock-sure Reader, not, for what you think. O, Reader

    Sweet! and Reader Strange! Reader Deaf and Reader

    Dear, I understand you yourself may be hard-

    pressed to bare this small and unnecessary burden

    having only just recently gotten over the clean clean heart-

    break of spring. And I, Reader, I am but the daughter

    of a tinker. I am not above the use of bucktail spinners,

    white grubs, minnow tails. Reader, worms

    and sinkers. Thisandthese curtail me

    to be brief: Reader, our sex gone

    to wildweather. YesReaderYes—that feels much-much

    better. (And my new Reader will come to me empty-

    handed, with a countenance that roses, lavenders, and cakes.

    And my new Reader will be only mildly disappointed.

    My new Reader can wait, can wait, can wait.) Light

    -minded, snow-blind, nervous, Reader, Reader, troubled, Reader,

    what'd

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